


a deeper season than reason

by cobaltmoony, CoraRochester



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon compliant but still an AU, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Romance, What if Thor showed up for CA:CW, and what if Bucky went to Asgard instead of Wakanda, basically what if I gave Thor and Bucky a summer romance before Ragnarok & IW, hints of unconsummated stucky, some canon typical angst, various characters from Norse mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-02 09:33:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19196227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobaltmoony/pseuds/cobaltmoony, https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraRochester/pseuds/CoraRochester
Summary: “This is nothing like falling,” Thor promised, wrapping a thick arm around Bucky’s waist and tugging him even closer so Bucky’s front was pressed flush along Thor’s muscular side. His armor was hard, unyielding, and Bucky’s belly instinctively tightened as he gripped the back of Thor’s armor with his right arm. “I won’t let go. Just a few moments, and we’ll be in Asgard. All you have to do is hold on.”...Bucky Barnes goes to Asgard.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> It's finally here!!! Featuring five chapters, an epilogue, and AH-MAZ-ING art scattered throughout. Not only did cobaltmoony create the art that inspired this whole thing (seriously, how did this get to nearly 34k) , and not only did she create MORE art, but she also helped me with every part of getting this story out of my brain and into your eyeballs. Writing with a friend makes the whole experience a heck of a lot better, and it's made this a much richer story than anything I could've produced on my own.
> 
> And to that point, enormous thanks are owed to gyroscope, for bailing me out and beta reading this story even in the 11th hour. So many corrections, so little time!!!!
> 
> There is a bit of mixing and matching with regards to Norse mythology and MCU/Thor mythos. While writing this I relied on Neil Gaiman's _Norse Mythology_ , which is a beautiful book & helped me flesh out some of my thoughts about Asgard.
> 
> This story is meant to be a sort of canon compliant off-shoot somewhere around the middle of Civil War. Basically, this is the "What-if Thor _did_ show up for Civil War, took Bucky back to Asgard after Siberia," Bucky/Thor romance I never knew I wanted so desperately. 
> 
> We hope you enjoy it, too!

 

> _yes is a pleasant country:_
> 
> _if’s wintry_
> 
> _(my lovely)_
> 
> _let’s open the year_
> 
> _both is the very weather_
> 
> _(not either)_
> 
> _my treasure,_
> 
> _when violets appear_
> 
> _love is a deeper season_
> 
> _than reason;_
> 
> _my sweet one_
> 
> _(and april’s where we’re)_
> 
> e e cummings, poem XXXVIII

 

* * *

 

 

Inside the quinjet, still idling outside the Siberian facility, T’Challa carefully cleaned up the sparking remains of Bucky’s left arm. Steve braced him upright while Thor and T’Challa talked over their heads, pointing out wires to cut or tuck away, watching carefully for signs of pain or neurological reactions. There were few tools on the jet, and there wasn’t much T’Challa could do, except kill the power and cut away the worst of the exposed wires.

“It only needs to last long enough for me to take us to Asgard,” Thor said, and Bucky was strangely comforted at how blithely Thor was treating a severed metal limb, like it was an everyday occurrence in his kingdom. T'Challa, too, had been nonchalant about it, though less effusively so. “Our healers will handle it in no time.”

After that, there was nothing else to do but leave. It was awkward and quiet, just the rumble of boots on the metal ramp of the quinjet as they walked back outside. Steve’s arm was braced gingerly along Bucky’s shoulders, carrying some of his weight. “Are you sure about this?” Steve murmured for the last time, his face so close that Bucky could see the faintest shadow of freckles across the bridge of his long nose. The last time Bucky had seen those, Europe had been slipping towards autumn and Bucky had still just been himself.

Bucky leaned into Steve’s grip for one long moment, inhaling the smell of exhaustion and sweat, scorched metal and burnt cloth. It was awful and familiar, and his throat was cinching itself shut, but Bucky was too tired to cry over it. He closed his eyes. Opened them. “Yeah, pal, I’m sure.” Steve’s arm tightened along his back, and then Bucky was in front of Thor, and Steve’s arm was gone.

Steve and Thor clasped forearms. Thor was a little taller, the shape of his face less set and solemn, softened by his beard. No matter what he wore, Steve was a man that always looked buttoned up and belted into his dress greens, clean-shaven and straight-backed. Thor moved with a more languid grace, not lumbering, but heavier than human, in a way Bucky had never seen before. Leaning forward, Thor whispered in Steve’s ear, and the sound of it was lost into the whistle of the wind. Bucky only saw the whiteness of Steve’s knuckles on Thor’s arm, and the sharp nod he gave as he pulled away, face drawn up to a taut blankness. Bucky grit his teeth and curled his hand into a fist, guilt settling like a blanket on his mismatched shoulders.

Then Steve was facing him again. There was an awkward, abortive movement where Steve lifted his arms a little, dropped them, and then Bucky was wrapped up in a tight hug. Steve was careful to avoid the remainder of Bucky’s arm. “Goodbye, Buck,” Steve said. “Take care of yourself.”

“Should be saying that to you,” Bucky muttered back, and Steve’s arms tightened around him. He gripped the back of Steve’s tac suit as best he could, squeezing the fabric until he was sure it would rip. “But I promise. I promise.”

Steve’s inhale was a deep, shuddering thing that Bucky felt through their clothes. And then Steve was gone, backing up to stand near T’Challa.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Bucky said.

T’Challa shook his head. “I am sorry, too, for my part in what has happened here. Wakanda will always be open to you, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky felt like there should’ve been something else for him to say, but he couldn’t figure out what. He felt parched, cracked open and dry down to his bones. There was nothing left inside of him right now.

There were more awkward farewells, and then Thor turned to Bucky. “Ready for Asgard?”

“Yeah,” he said. Bucky looked to Steve one last time, scrounging up the remains of a smile and offering it up, before turning away to face Thor.

“This is nothing like falling,” Thor promised, wrapping a thick arm around Bucky’s waist and tugging him even closer so Bucky’s front was pressed flush along Thor’s muscular side. His armor was hard, unyielding, and Bucky’s belly instinctively tightened as he gripped the back of Thor’s armor with his right arm. “I won’t let go. Just a few moments, and we’ll be in Asgard. All you have to do is hold on.”

Thor lifted his hammer. “HEIMDALL,” he shouted, and there was a sudden surge of light, a terrifying split-second where everything was electricity, a surge of pressure that seemed to swallow him—

It was like flying.

Everything in the world rushed past him: he saw only black at first, then bursts of color, everything around Bucky brightening and coalescing into rainbow streaks. At the center of it all was a bright, white prism.

Asgard— that was the white thing exploding outwards towards them, rapidly taking shape, a glorious shimmering cityscape and—

They landed on their feet, shockwaves bursting up through his legs from the force of their landing. The only reason Bucky stayed upright was the iron grip Thor had on his waist.

Thor’s arms loosened slowly around him, his big hands drifting away as Bucky’s legs began to stop trembling. Bucky felt winded, and he realized his right arm was shaking from the sheer force he’d used to grip the back of Thor’s red cape. His fingers were achy and he flexed them a couple times, trying to ease the stiffness.

Bucky’s eyes darted around. They were in a gold-colored circular room, open arches all around them. Facing them was a man with a sword positioned in some sort of heavy oblong stand that rose from the center of the room. From behind the man’s ornate gold helmet, twin horns rising above his temples, the man’s eyes were a preternatural amber, glowing against his rich brown skin. His face was perfectly impassive as he gazed at what Bucky was sure was an unlikely tableau— Thor, in all his god-like glory, casually holding up a scruffy one-armed human with the charred remains of a metal shoulder. The man didn’t blink.

Everything around Bucky seemed brighter, more intense, than it did on Earth. Was this just because he was lightheaded and overwhelmed, or was this place really that different?

Looking around, Bucky found it impossible to take it all in. His eyes stuttered over Asgard as it unfolded around him; the colors it was painted in were somehow more saturated than on Earth, and the cityscape outside of this circular hub gleamed in unreal height and glory.

“Welcome to Asgard, Bucky,” Thor said. His big hand settled in the middle of Bucky’s back, guiding him forward into a god’s own white light.

 

* * *

 

Thor had his hands locked behind his head, feet crossed at the ankles. Above them, the stars were gleaming, aligned in constellations Bucky had yet to make sense of. Bucky was pliant with the sleepiness that came with all-day exertion, comfortably resting and listening to the quiet susurrations of the woodland bedding down with them. As night had fallen further, Thor had gone quieter, his usual stream of conversation seeming to slip away with the light.

There were easier ways to get to Svartalfheim, Thor had told him, but the two day journey was worth the adventure. “There’s so much to be seen, here,” Thor had said at the outset of their journey, following a river out of the city, drawing them deeper into a verdant forest. “I did not always take my responsibilities as prince seriously enough,” he said, “but I learned these realms by traveling them. I thought you might like the same.”

The first half of their journey had been easy, really, even if Bucky lacked an arm. The healers had put him into some sort of sleep state and removed the last vestiges of the vibranium arm, replacing it with some sort of socket. It had been covered when Bucky woke, and he had been careful to keep it that way ever since. There was no pain— they must’ve done something to the scars and the Frankenstein’s monster of circuitry that lived under his skin. He hadn’t wanted to ask.

His balance wasn’t perfect, but Thor carried all their gear and still managed to catch Bucky’s elbow from time to time, or sling an arm over Bucky’s shoulder as they crossed streams or skidded down steep hills. It was strangely companionable, and the sheer size and force of Thor left no room for self-consciousness. It wasn’t that different from how the Howlies had relied on each other from time to time, like when an ankle got twisted or someone got caught too close to an explosion, ears ringing and scraped to hell.

Thor also could talk for ages. It seemed like there was a story for every marker they passed, or one story would tumble into the next. There was no pressure for Bucky to reciprocate— it seemed like Thor just liked to tell stories.

But after they had settled down by a massive tree, eating a dinner of dried fruit and dried meat and spreading piles of blankets across the springy grass, Thor had grown quiet, stretching out on his back and staring up at the sky.

“What’s going to happen?” Bucky asked.

“Well, tomorrow we see the Sons of Ivaldi. If anyone can fashion you a new arm, it will be them.”

“And after that?”

“I suppose that’s up to you,” Thor said. “We find you a job, a place to stay. The healers are confident that they can undo the damage to your memories and stop the trigger words, but they suspect it will take a few sessions.”

Bucky looked over at Thor, and saw he was staring up at the sky. His feet were wiggling at the toes, the brown leather of his boots moving back and forth in tiny motions. His bare arms were still folded behind his head, the muscles bulging in long, defined swells. It wasn’t that Thor was twitchy— it was more like the way a heart was always moving, always beating with a precision that was matched only by its brute force.

“Shouldn’t we wait for a while… until I’m better?”

Thor’s head lolled lazily to the side, meeting Bucky’s eyes. “Wait for what?”

“The arm,” Bucky answered, awkwardly hitching up the covered stump.

He was only met with a lazy handwave. “You can’t hurt anyone here,” he said. “There are only Asgardians here, and we are the strongest in the nine realms. There are none among us who know the trigger words. None save perhaps Heimdall, and he is loyal to me. Besides,” Thor said. “I believe that if you are as much a danger as you think, one or two arms won’t make much difference. But two arms _will_ make it easier for you to find worthy occupation.”

“I could work with one arm.”

“Yes, but why?” Thor asked easily.

 _Because I feel guilty,_ he wanted to say, but he didn’t.

“All will be well,” Thor promised, settling in even more firmly. His big shoulders rocked back and forth, and Bucky could hear the rustle of his tough leather armor rubbing against the wool. Thor sighed contentedly, a big gusty thing. “You will see.”

Once Thor was settled, he started talking again, the comfortably slow cadence of one of his stories.

“My brother, Loki, he used to join me on these trips. You never met him, but he was a strange one,” Thor said, sounding fond. His feet bounced up and down, once, twice. “We’d camp like this. Well, not quite like this. I like to sleep in the open air. But Loki, oh, he was too good for that. Once he slept in a giant’s glove, when we could find nothing else.”

“A giant’s… glove?”

“Oh, yes. We were close to Jötunheim, where the giants live. Practically a frozen wasteland, if you ask me. Some of the coldest battles I’ve seen in my day.”

Bucky was quiet as he thought about that. It was sometimes difficult to arrange in his mind, the idea that the stories Thor had been telling him all day were the kernel of truth to the myths he’d once read about, paging through his mother’s battered green copy of Bullfinch’s _Mythology_.

“Loki used to make deals with the elves. Little jests and competitions to get them to make the best weapons, the finest jewelry. He was too smart for his own good, I think, but it’s how Mjolnir was made.”

The war hammer gleamed dully in the banked light of the embers, perched handle up at Thor’s side, and Bucky was struck by how plain and innocuous it looked. _None can lift it but me,_ Thor had boasted earlier in the day. It seemed to Bucky that both hammer and man lent each other a certain air of strength, a symbiotic arrangement of power that anyone would be foolish to challenge. He’d seen Thor throw it at the airfield in Germany— the might behind each blow of the hammer was unmistakable.

“There’s a reason why the handle is so short,” Thor said. He grabbed the hammer with one hand and rolled onto his side to face Bucky. The hammer was placed between them, and Thor tapped the leather strap at the end of the hammer. “See?”

It was true, it _was_ short. Thor pressed his palm to the terminus of the handle, and the overhang of his fingers almost entirely obscured the leather grip.

Bucky reached out, hesitating. He looked to Thor, who nodded, and with careful fingers, Bucky traced the blunted corners of the squat hammer. Under his fingers, he could feel where runes had been carved into the metal. The firelight cast shadows in the relief of each engraved rune.

“Loki convinced Eitri and Brokk to create three items,” Thor began quietly, “to compete with the three creations of the Three Sons of Ivaldi.”

Letting his fingers skim sideways, Bucky found that the flat sides of the hammer weren’t quite smooth: there were subtle pocks and shallow scrapes. The whole thing felt warm under his fingers.

“If they won the contest, if the two created the best items, Eitri and Brokk wanted Loki’s head, so he could no longer play his tricks and pander his lies.”

Bucky looked up, fingers pausing over a carving, but Thor seemed far away at the moment, not looking at Bucky or the fire, but at his own hand where it lay over the handle. “At the time, I didn’t know this. He was always so secretive, my brother. Anyway, to save his head, he transformed himself into a fly, and bit at the brothers while they worked the bellows and stoked the flame. And when they made Mjolnir, he bit them so hard around the eyes, the flames faltered and the metal failed to fill the cast just right. And so, the handle was slightly too short.”

Thor was quiet, and his fingers twitched— almost imperceptibly, really, and if Bucky hadn’t been staring, he might not have caught the motion.

“Of course they won, and the Allfather gifted the hammer to me.”

Bucky traced the runes along blunted corners, his fingers skating so close to Thor’s fingers that he imagined he could feel the callouses that surely must live on Thor’s skin. “And Loki?” Bucky asked in a whisper.

“Brokk made a compromise with our father,” Thor said, absently. His fingers twitched again, this time grazing Bucky’s. “He would leave Loki his head, but sew his lips shut. Of course, Loki didn’t leave the stitches in for very long, but I think it was something of a lesson learned. If he wasn’t wearing a glamour, you could see the scars. Faint ones, little dots around his mouth.” Thor’s hand left his hammer, absently thumbing the beard beneath his lower lip. “But that was many years ago,” Thor said, dropping his hand. Their eyes met for a moment, and Bucky could see the way grief did live in those narrow blue eyes, hidden, perhaps, by Thor’s more boisterous traits.

Thor placed the hammer back on his other side so it no longer rested between them. He reclined again, lacing his hands behind his head. “The Sons of Ivaldi will be able to help you. They dabble less in weaponry and instead make more delicate creations. They will be able to make you a fine arm, unlike anything on Midgard. It will not only be strong, but refined. An arm fit for a man that is not mere mortal.” Thor looked at Bucky with a smile. All previous traces of sadness had fled his handsome face. “Steve has told me many things about you, Bucky. I know this is what he would want for you.”

Bucky laughed, but the sound was rusty and it sounded grim, even to his own ears. “Yeah, Steve’s like that.”

“He is the best man I have known. And I have known many men over many centuries. If he sees the best in you, then that is enough for me,” Thor said, simply.

Because it was dark, because it was another planet and Steve was an inconceivable distance away, because Thor was something like a man but also a deity, it was easy for Bucky to make his confession. “I’m not like I was,” he told those incomprehensible constellations. “But I’d like to try to be, again.”

“Good,” Thor said, and it was nice to believe it could be so simple. It was a good thought to fall asleep to, so Bucky let the silence expand outwards into the blank peacefulness of sleep.

 

* * *

 

By the earliest gleam of morning, the fire had died out to nothing but a few dim coals dressed with grey ash. It was cold enough that they had curled up into each other in the night, Thor’s arm looped around his middle, Thor’s body hot against his back. Woolen blankets were draped over them, cocooning them in musky warmth, and Bucky kept his eyes closed to savor the unexpected comfort of another body against his.

He had slept like this during the war. Bucky remembered that from a nondescript slurry of everyday-type memories— Steve, his massive body throwing heat, curled entirely around Bucky’s frame, which had suddenly become small in comparison. It had been commonplace in the war, where they were all tired and cold and damp with sweat and snow. It had meant nothing then, just warmth between bodies. It meant nothing now, Bucky reasoned despite himself.

Dawn was a many colored thing in Asgard, grey light warming with yellow and red and a faint tinge of green. Bucky pulled himself out from under Thor’s arm and struggled upwards, untangling himself from the warm pile of blankets and getting to his feet unsteadily, still unused to his missing left arm.

He got ready for the day down by the narrow stream that pointed their way to Svartalfheim, cleaning up as best he could with cold water splashed onto his only hand. Bucky drank from his cupped palm, and squinted up at the sun as it rose. Birds warbled and sang above him, mostly unseen in the greenery.

When Bucky returned to the tree they’d slept under, he saw that Thor had already rolled up their bedding and packed it away into his leather bag. Thor ripped a loaf of dense bread in half, and they ate while they walked, sharing water.

They made it to Svartalfheim by midday, even if Bucky didn’t realize it at first. A wooden frame had been fit to the mouth of a cave, and when Bucky peered in, he could see nothing but relentless black— not even the ground was visible. While Bucky studied the perfectly fitted wood frame, Thor moved around behind him, tucking their supplies behind some rocks. When Bucky turned around, expecting an explanation, he just saw Thor, idly swinging his hammer around, the strap wrapped around his wrist. The sun glinted down from its zenith, making the dull iron-color gleam.

“You enjoyed our flight to Asgard, yes?”

Bucky thought for a moment. “Guess so,” he said. “I’m thinking there’s no chance of walking, is there?”

Thor’s grin spoke for itself.

This time, knowing what to expect, it was easier to stitch himself to Thor’s side. He reached under the cloak and curled his hand around a strap of Thor’s armor, tucked his knees tightly around Thor’s leg. Thor’s arm curled again around his back, locking him in place.

The hammer spun again and again, impossibly fast. Little sparks of lightning crackled in a halo around Thor’s hand. The light only served to enhance the black mouth of the cave, mere inches from their bodies.

Sound rose up around them, a wave of thunder that made the very air around them tremble. “This will be a little like falling,” Thor warned, voice raised to be heard. “Don’t worry, you’re far too insubstantial to drop.”

And like that, they were falling, falling backwards into the black mouth of the cave like there was no ground beneath them, only a desperate, headfirst rush to the very center of the world. The only light was the relentless, staticky rush of lighting as it burned blue and white around Thor’s hammer. It propelled them inwards, downwards.

There was a split second of stomach-flipping madness, and then Thor whooped loudly in Bucky’s ear, laughing, and for the next few breathless moments, this was the teetering, roller coaster freefall of streaking downwards on the Cyclone, two kids from Brooklyn shrieking in joy as Coney Island rose up to meet them.

They landed in Svartalfheim with a concussive blow; Thor slammed into the ground boots-first and only Bucky’s training saved him from crumpling at the knees.

The darkness was slow to abate, but eventually Bucky saw that they were in some sort of massive atrium, inky nothingness above them and pounded earth walls around them. Set into the walls, maybe a handful of feet above their heads, were evenly spaced halos of yellow light. He let go of Thor and turned enough to see that there was a single path, again lit along the walls. The path curved out of sight ahead of them.

“Not bad, eh?” Thor asked, already moving forward in even strides.

Bucky followed, and was surprised it was the truth when he agreed.

Above them, the ceiling vaulted to impossible, cathedral heights. As they walked, his eyes were drawn upwards and he thought maybe it was important for people who lived underground to have such open space above them, a ceiling skyline. The air here was a little heavier and cooler than it was above ground, loamy and tinged with a metallic sharpness, but at least there was room to breathe.

Less than an hour’s walk led them to the Sons of Ivaldi. Well before they reached their forge, Bucky could hear their rhythmic hammering reverberating, growing louder with each step. When they finally reached the forge, it was announced by a rounded arch entryway, cut right into the earthen wall and lined with gold. The arch was enormous, yawning upwards maybe thirty feet or so, and half as wide. Massive runes, the size of a man’s hand, were etched deeply into the gold and crawled up the arch until they were merely indistinct shapes above his head.

“Mother of god,” Bucky swore. He’d never seen so much gold in all his life, and he wasn’t even past the door.

He stepped into the forge, and everything towered above him. The tables, the chairs. The bellows, the roaring fireplace. Carelessly stacked gold ingots. Dull lumps of some ferrous metal.

The Sons of Ivaldi themselves.

There were three of them, and each of the three were about four times bigger than even Thor himself. Giants, massively formed and lumbering through a room that made Bucky think of a hollowed out tenement building. He looked around stupidly, shocked at the sight.

“Ah, yes,” Thor said, smiling up at the Sons of Ivaldi, now taking notice of the interlopers in their forge. “I had forgotten that Midgardians seemed to think dwarves are small creatures.”

“These aren’t giants?” Bucky whispered, leaning in close to Thor’s ear.

Thor laughed at that. “Of course not. Giants are much larger.”

Bucky felt a little dazed as the three dwarves came to stand around them, looming overhead like Bucky was a dog sat on the ground. “Thor, it’s been some time,” the one in the middle said. His voice was loud, and a reddish beard covered much of his face. “What brings you to Svartalfheim?”

“I thought to bring you a challenge,” Thor replied, draping an arm around Bucky’s shoulders. “A Midgardian warrior in need of an arm.”

“Ah, still trifling with Midgardians, I see,” the middle son said. The other two dwarves remained silent on either side of the brother—one with dark hair, the other with light. “Though it has been centuries since we’ve seen one. Especially a warrior.” He dipped forward, and Bucky saw that the man’s eyes were blue, shielded by bushy and brassy red eyebrows. “What’s your name, Midgardian?”

“Bucky Barnes,” he answered.

The dwarf hummed in vague acknowledgement, returning to his great height well above their heads. “What strange names you lot have,” he murmured, though it was loud to Bucky’s ears. “They have short lives, you know,” the dwarf warned. “What makes this one so special?”

“He’s already one hundred, ancient in his realm,” Thor announced. “And still he is stronger than ever, a man still in his prime. His last arm was metal, made by Midgardians. And still it failed him in battle. He needs an arm to match his strength.”

Red Beard’s face remained impassive as he looked closely at Bucky. He felt like a pearl the exact moment before a jeweler put it between their teeth.

“What do you have to say, Bucky Barnes of Midgard?” the red-bearded son of Ivaldi asked. “Give us a good reason, and it will be done.”

Bucky wasn’t sure he had a reason to offer. He looked to Thor, who looked back at him with an inscrutable look on his face, dark honey brows drawn close together and mouth set with unexpected gravitas.

He thought about laying under the Asgardian night next to Thor, and what Steve would want. He spared a thought for the great albatross of his own tired guilt. He thought about what the next years of his life could look like, and found it was something like a white blankness that stretched out before him. He didn’t know.

“I was sick for a real long time— they’d shock my brain until I didn’t remember much of anything. And they gave me my last arm and they used me, and I used the arm, to do a lot of bad. And the last arm just… It hurt, all the time, even after I was able to start remembering again.” He touched the place where the metal arm had once been fused to his body, and then sunk his fingers deeper, to where the empty socket had been placed and still wrapped in ivory linen so he didn’t have to look at it. “I want to be able to make it right. That’s my reason,” he said.

Red Beard looked at him for a long moment. “And you think you are able to make it right?”

Bucky looked at Thor, who was staring back at him. He was solid and warm, cast in fiery light from the tall fire that loomed great in the forge. His eyes looked almost like fire, as well, the blue cast with a light that was yellow and red. Thor offered no answers, beyond the immobile bulwark of his support.

“No,” he said honestly, thinking of the great black scribbles he’d painfully etched into his notebooks, the details of every bad thing he’d ever done, willfully or not. He thought of all the black behind him and the uncertainty of every day that he had stretching out before him. “No, there’s no changing any of it. It was me that did those things.”

“But you will try anyway,” the Son of Ivaldi said. There was consideration in his voice.

Bucky shrugged. “Can’t seem to die,” he said. “May as well try to do something right.”

 

* * *

 

The new arm was gold.

“How strong is it?” Thor asked, fitting his hand around the bend of Bucky’s elbow. He squeezed, but the gold did not give. Bucky felt the pressure, but there wasn’t any pain.

“Not strong enough to withstand Mjolnir, if that is what you are asking,” the red-bearded Son of Ivaldi answered. His leather apron was dark with soot and singed from the work, same as his brothers’. “But quite strong, even for an Asgardian. There is little in the Nine Realms that could destroy it.”

Bucky looked at his hands, and the carefully articulated joints of his knuckles that moved each time he slowly rolled his fingers into a fist. He turned his wrist and there was an anatomical neatness to the motion of the layered plates. His last arm was brutishly robotic compared to the ultra-fine detail of this dwarf-made limb.

“I told you,” Thor said. “Refined. No other being in the Nine Realms could make anything like this.”

When he rolled his shoulder, it was silent and easy. No pulling at the scarring on his shoulder, nor the place where the socket had been made to fit metal to his body. There would be no replacing his own arm— the arm he’d been born with, the arm he’d done everything with, right up until the day he’d fallen from the train— but an arm made by the blacksmiths of the gods was better than the weapon Hydra had welded into his brutishly enhanced skeleton.

“Well, shit,” Bucky finally said, equal parts awe and bafflement. Reaching out, he lightly ran the flesh-and-bone fingers of his right hand up the center of the golden palm, just the faintest touch— the sensation folded in on itself in his brain, metal against his fingers, fingers against the metal, all of it being processed at the same time. The duality of his body, for the first time, did not feel like a curse borne of an artificially prolonged life.

Looking up, Bucky saw that all three of the dwarves— massive, stone-faced— were watching him. He felt small, standing beside Thor and staring up at those huge, magic beings, but it was a comfort to savor his own powerlessness. “Thank you,” he said.

The red-bearded Son of Ivaldi almost smiled, almost kindly. “You are welcome, Bucky Barnes of Midgard.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to live in the palace,” Thor argued, ducking his head as he stepped into the small, lofted bedroom. It was mostly sloped ceiling and a wide, shallow window that looked out over the quiet city street, a bed tucked under the highest point of the roof. A squat dresser that fit against the short walls. Bare floors of honey-brown wood, white walls that gleamed under the resplendent Asgardian sun that poured in through the uncurtained window.

Bucky looked around. The walls seemed smaller around Thor, who was long and broad and took up more space with his being than he did with his body. No, he supposed Thor was probably used to high ceilings and huge halls. Or used to the limitlessness of sleeping under the stars, maybe, the way Asgard seemed to unfurl around them like a silk tapestry snapping in the wind.

But to a kid that had grown up, happy and crowded, in an old Brooklyn tenement, who had spent his last adult years at war with thousands of guys bedding down in the same mud, who had woken up seventy years later and hidden himself in studio apartments in cities that, like him, were still in a sort of post-Soviet Bloc recovery— a whole house to himself was an unimaginable luxury.

Bucky set down a small bag of clothes and toiletries someone from the palace had put together for him— the little house was mostly furnished, save for a tenant and their effects. He turned around to see Thor peering out the window, looking down at the smooth, cobbled streets. They were nothing like the uneven stone roads and alleys that had plodded uncomfortable paths through the city when he was a kid.

“This neighborhood is nothing but old people,” Thor noted, sounding aggrieved.

Bucky laughed. “I don’t mind the quiet,” he said. “It’s nice, actually. Steve and I, we grew up in apartments smaller than this. I had to share a bed with my sister. Bathroom was down the hall, had to share it with everyone on the floor.”

Thor turned away from the window, and flopped backwards onto the bed. He was careful enough to keep his boots away from the linens as he wriggled backwards, hands behind his head, elbow knocking against the wall. Bucky caught the sour look Thor flashed him at that, and he smiled back, amused. “The beds in the palace are bigger,” Thor said pointedly.

That was an enticement dressed up as a complaint, but Bucky just shrugged, still smiling, combing his hair back and tying it up off his neck. The air was comfortably warm here, like the perpetual crisp slide of spring into summer, without the grim overhang of smog that had blanketed what felt like all of New York.

Besides, the bed didn’t look too small to Bucky.

Thor lay on the bed while Bucky tucked clothes into the dresser, giving up on denouncing the cottage as too small and moving on to describing the nearby taverns and bakeries, the pathway to a quiet lake with green water and the old stone observatory on the outskirts of the city. According to Thor, there was plenty to keep him entertained.

It didn’t take long to unpack. Bucky hadn’t come up here with anything but the bloodstained clothes on his back, and everything he possessed now had been provided by the palace staff. There had been some Euros in his tac pants, but Thor had merely looked at them, admired how colorful they were, and handed them back, seemingly without comprehending that they were, in fact, cash.

It sort of stung his pride, but Thor had instead given him money, a wallet of light Asgardian coins with runic imagery stamped on them. Bucky had been forced to swallow his instinctive protests and accept the money gratefully. What else could he do, on a planet where he knew nothing, knew no one besides Thor, but take the money.

“I’ll pay you back when I can start working,” Bucky had promised.

But Thor had waved that off, too, with all the carelessness of someone that had been born into godly amounts of money, and Bucky had let it go for the time being.

Bucky closed the last drawer and turned back around to see Thor getting up off the bed. “I suppose it’s not so bad,” Thor conceded, walking under the highest point of the roof until he was next to Bucky, looking down at the dresser, a tanned hand reaching out to thumb the comb Bucky had laid out next to the paper-wrapped soaps and glass bottles.

Thor turned then, studying Bucky with narrowed eyes, head tilted to one side a little. Bucky did not flinch when Thor reached out, pinching a loose lock of hair that fell to Bucky’s cheek. Instead, he remained very, very still, watching Thor’s contemplative face.

“You ought to braid this,” Thor said, twisting the lock of hair into a tightly wound rope and smoothing it back, pressing it to the side of Bucky’s head, perhaps an inch or so beyond his ear. Thor held it there for a long moment, humming in approval of his own idea before dropping his hand.

Bucky looked at Thor, and noticed for the first time the small braids woven through his hair, some pulled back, others hanging down to his shoulders and knotted with small black bands. Thor’s hair was like Steve’s— sun-bleached on top, but darker underneath, honey shot through with sunlight and chestnut.

“I don’t have anything to tie them off,” Bucky said and— and it was strange, because Bucky felt a prickle of something. Envy? Want? His old vanity, finally blinking awake?

Bucky eyed Thor’s hair for a moment longer, inhaling his clean, citrus scent and eyeing the gorgeous wool folds of Thor’s shirt. He thought about the lank, uneven fall of his own hair, the drab black he seemed to wear out of some rote habit turned instinct. He felt small, grimy, compared to Thor, like he had shown up to a dance hall in his grease-stained coveralls and work boots.

Definitely vanity.

With a few quick tugs, Thor had yanked the ties from his own hair, dropping three or four of them into Bucky’s hands. “Here, to get you started. There’s a couple of shops a few streets north of here, if you need more.” Thor backed up a few steps, and Bucky noticed for the first time how crooked Thor’s smile could be, too good natured to be devilish but not quite pure. “I must return to the palace,” Thor said. “But if you need anything, come find me. They’ll know to let you in.”

“Yeah, alright. I’ll be back in a couple days, anyway. I have to meet with the healers.”

Thor paused at the stairs, looking back at Bucky. “Right, of course,” he said. “You will be well, I’m sure of it.” Again, that effortless confidence, an assurance in a world far different from the one Bucky came from.

“Thank you,” Bucky said, hand curled up tight around the hair ties.

“Of course, Bucky,” Thor said, already slipping down the stairs, ducking his head to fit.

Later that evening, Bucky found himself in front of the mirror in the narrow bathroom of his house. His hair was still damp from his bath, and his fingers moved easily through the slow-drying waves. It was easier than he thought, to fold tiny locks of hair over and over each other, from root to uneven ends. It was slightly trickier, to wrap the tiny band around the even tinier braid until it was snug.

When he was finished, the braid fell along his neck, just behind his ear, a defined texture against the loose fall of hair. Bucky looked at himself in the mirror and saw someone that was clean, healthy. Not the same well-dressed man he once was, but good enough, for now.

Even later still, he climbed the narrow stairs up to his small bedroom, where a small lamp was lit at bedside. He looked out of his own window and saw homes like this one: small, tidy, lit from within with delicate halos of light. The street was empty, quiet. The night was peaceful: no rumbling trains, no strangers living their lives on the other side of thin plaster walls, no drunks rambling through the streets. It was the nicest place he’d lived, better than his memories of the idyllic Brooklyn of his childhood, when he was still young enough to be cocooned away from the grittier things. It was so quiet, in fact, that it felt like he could be quiet here, too, like there was no danger great enough to tap into that sick, broken part of him. The violence within had gone quiet, too.

Bucky fell into bed and turned out the light. His vision was good enough to still see the peak of his own roof, the ceiling darkened by shadow and lit with streaks of moonlight.

Perhaps he should have felt alone, here, in this house that was not his, on this planet he didn’t belong to, among people that were beyond human, even more than he was. Maybe Bucky should’ve felt alone— but he did not, here in his own bedroom, in his own warm bed. On his pillow, Bucky could smell the faint scent of citrus and cedar, warm and bright, and he fell asleep easily, comforted by something he wasn’t ready to put to words.

 

* * *

 

The house Bucky lived in was tucked into the quiet, forested side of the city, with small homes and trees that lined the stone-paved walkways. But a few blocks north, closer to the city center, the streets started to fill with shops, streams of people meandering around storefront stands and children tucked together around their parents’ knees. It was like a wave of sunshine-brightened Brooklyn, breaking over him the same way so many of the outdoor markets in Europe had, in drifts of inconsistent scent and crowds that never quite parted around him, but seemed to glide, conversations ebbing and flowing without cease.

From a bakery on a corner, he bought a roll— puffed up to bigger than his own fist, flaking apart under his fingers— and he ate it as he wandered. Bucky had woke with the sun, and left his house early in the morning to wander towards the palace healer. He had wanted to see the city as it staggered into wakefulness, and Asgard had not disappointed. It was a beautiful city— wealth was written into each well-fitted cobblestone, the gleaming white stone buildings that rose to such great heights, the clean gutters, the fat-cheeked children, and the lushly arrayed storefronts.

Bucky found what he was looking for in a narrow, unassuming storefront, tucked between an alley and a much larger and brighter store. A single glance through the window was enough— he didn’t need to be able to read the runes painted on the window to realize it was a stationery shop.

The inside was dim; there was no fanciful lighting nor were there many windows for the absurdly bright Asgardian light to puddle through. The smell of paper hung heavily in the air, grainy and wooden, and Bucky inhaled deeply, soothed by scent alone. Most of the interior was dressed in dark wood, waxy and ornate, with shadows of dust hidden in the scrollwork and grooves. An orange cat— if it could be called a cat, and not a giant— was sprawled across the bottom of one of the sun-faded window displays, its long fur a little wiry and dense. The tip of its tail twitched in faint agitation when Bucky closed the door behind himself. The cat had to weigh close to fifty pounds, but it merely glared at Bucky through slitted eyes before returning its slumber.

It was a small shop, split down the middle by an enormous slab of a countertop— wood, again, laid out on top of an elaborately carved cabinet. Although it had probably been quite shiny at one point, the wood was now dulled by age, worn to a quiet solidity. The countertop was cluttered with pens and pencils, ink and charcoal. On either side of the counter, the walls were lined with shelves from ceiling to floor; each shelf was pressed full of stationary. There were stacks of loose paper, from tiny, colorful little squares, to great big sheets, all rolled up like the world’s thinnest carpet. There were pens in glass jars, perched precariously here and there, only barely catching the light.

And of course: journals.

Bucky found what he was looking for on a low, narrow shelf against the back wall, underneath a sheaf of thick cardstock. Simple journals, with thin brown leather covers and a length of plain ribbon to hold his place. There were three left, and he took them all down from the shelf. They were the perfect size, a little bigger than a paperback book, but thin enough to write in without cracking the spine apart on the first page. They were plain but not cheap. The leather was supple, the paper smooth, the binding sturdy, and he flipped quickly through the uppermost journal. The shuffle of blank page after blank page stung when he thought of his notebooks from before.

The notebooks from before were gone, surrendered to SHIELD when he was taken into custody in Europe. They were probably already being picked part, page by page. Bucky felt sick, thinking about all the terrible things he’d written down. The bile he’d exorcised from his own sick and confused mind, the patchy scrape of memories that rubbed his nerves raw at inconstant intervals, and the bitter churn of guilt that had followed each writhing memory out of the rabbit hole. His words were probably scanned and uploaded to some server, where psychologists could diagnose him and analysts could solve assassinations from decades ago, all from the cold blue comfort of their computer screens.

More troublesome were the private things. Things he had written and crossed out, half-formed memories and feelings from a man that died a long time ago. Bucky tried to remember everything he had written about Steve, but it was impossible to recall every abortive thought that poured out of him on any given sleepless night.

But that was on Earth, and Bucky was here, now. What they did down there was distant. It was happening to a man that no longer existed.

The shopkeeper— an old man with small, tired eyes— patiently helped Bucky count out the right coins. It didn’t seem terribly expensive, though Bucky couldn’t be sure of the relative wealth he had in that pouch from Thor. For all he knew, Thor had presented him with a small fortune, and Bucky had just overpaid dearly. In a way, these shiny little coins with their funny engraving seemed less like real money and more like gambling chips to a happy drunk. Meaningless. Easy come, easy go.

But he felt no guilt afterwards, when he took the notebooks and a few pencils back to his home, walking at a pace with the wading crowd. He took the stairs up to his bedroom, and left the journals on a neat stack on his dresser. Finally, he laid the pencils in horizontal lines across the cover, carefully spacing them with careful nudges of his finger tips.

Bucky waited a moment to simply admire the way they looked, perfectly arranged and uncreased, spines yet unbent and pages snowy white and unblemished.

And then he left to continue back on to the palace, content with the knowledge that the journals would be there when the healers were done with him.

 

* * *

 

Elli was the oldest woman in the medical center, with white hair knotted into a wispy circle on the back of her head. Her eyes were a sharp blue, and they had receded into her face, slowly tracking the serene bustle of the infirmary from behind a thousand weathered wrinkles. She was tall but stooped, her grey gown hanging limply on her bent frame, and she walked with a cane of gnarled wood.

She grabbed Bucky’s chin with a surprisingly firm hand, turning his face from one side to the other. “Perhaps if Frigga were here we could do it all at once,” she said, her voice reedy and low. “But we shall make do with three, Midgardian.”

“Who’s Frigga?” he asked.

Her wrinkled lips pursed up. “Frigga was queen. She was the best of all us healers.” Those blue eyes sharpened to something crystalline. Brittle. Critical. “She died protecting the last Midgardian that Thor brought here, same as Loki. You had better not bring us the same trouble.”

“I think all the trouble’s inside my head,” he said. “Or on Earth, maybe.”

The old woman just hummed tunelessly, letting go of Bucky’s chin to beckon to the other two women in the room. Fulla approached first, and Bucky could see that her wheat colored hair disguised well the grey coming in at her temples, streaking through the mass of hair coiled at her neck. Her brown dress set off the hazel eyes, the sparkle of intelligence beyond her lashes. Behind her was Idunn, who looked barely eighteen, with white blonde hair and sky-blue eyes— the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, but doe-like, possessing a youthfulness that hovered on the precipice of childishness. She wore white, arms bared to reveal gold cuffs circling her slender upper arms.

The two younger women led him down a long hall to the last room of the infirmary. The walls of the room were like glittering sand, with one big window that overlooked a stone-paved courtyard.

“You may take off your shirt and lay down on the bed,” Fulla said, already turning to a metal chest set upon a table. Idunn followed at her side, the pair of them rummaging in wordless harmony.

Bucky pulled his plain blue shirt off and folded it into the smallest square he could manage, leaving it on a chair tucked into an inconspicuous corner of the room. The bed was on a tall frame, but lacked head and footboards. When he laid down, the cotton sheets were cool against his bare skin, but soft. He straightened his back and breathed out as slowly as he could, trying to force all of the tension out of his body with the last of his dragged-out exhale. He closed his eyes and took his next breath.

There was nothing very medicinal about this infirmary. It was imbued with the slightly overstated wealth that hung heavy through the whole palace; the very air itself carried a faint whiff of pleasing incense. There was nothing stark or bleached about the room— instead it was dressed in warm, muted earth tones and softly curving archways.

It seemed like a room for recovery, not surgery, and yet it was the same room they had taken him to when the three women had cleaned up the wreckage of his left arm. The surgery on his left shoulder had seemed easier than this nebulous concept of memory healing, or perhaps it just seemed that way now, in nervous retrospect. The work on his arm had felt like necessary maintenance, somehow straightforward and safe: Bucky knew well enough the far-reaching limits of his body’s healing process.

But this Asgardian process was far beyond what he knew, especially when the only thing he could imagine was the thick rubber bite block jammed between his teeth, the electric buzz of the chair as its tentacles descended to wrap around his head. Nothing about this room, or these women, or the warm sunshine reminded him about Hydra, and yet still he felt the acrid rise of an uneasy stomach, sweat on his upper lip, fists curled into rocks.

There was a faint sensation against his metal arm— fingers brushing over the sleek plates close to the wrist— and Bucky opened his eyes. “It won’t hurt,” Idunn said in her soft, high-pitched voice, the kind that made babies and men turn their heads. Her hair hung over one lean shoulder, practically waist-length. “We will make you sleep, besides,” she said.

Fulla appeared over Idunn’s shoulder. Her hand was calloused where Idunn’s was soft, and her care-worn fingertips moved lightly over the blush-pink scarring that lingered on his shoulder, his chest, in his armpit. “These healed better than I expected,” Fulla said, palpating a particularly vicious knob of scar tissue that lingered at his collarbone. She inspected Bucky the way a mother would: sharp eyes, careful but not without exerting the necessary pressure. “Midgardians typically do not recover so well.”

Generally Bucky avoided looking at the scars, but he had noticed how the vicious redness had softened, the obvious trauma of shredded skin somehow softening and blending more easily into regular flesh. Whatever the three of them had done had gone a long way in easing the constant ache and pulling at the mangled skin, replacing whatever machinery had lurked inside of him, unseen but felt.

“The dwarves did well by you, Midgardian,” Elli said, appearing at last between the two other women. She did not touch him, but her eyes traveled up and down the golden limb. “It was always Loki that could talk anyone into anything, but it would be wrong to underestimate Thor, even if he’s only half as clever. He is earnest, after all. All sorts of creatures like him. Want to please him.”

“Thor’s been good to me,” Bucky said carefully, not really sure if the old woman was insulting Thor or not. He assumed her age and position meant she was rather free to say what she felt. “I didn’t expect an arm like this,” he said, unable to keep from twitching it slightly, baring his golden arm to the sunlight and watching the light streak down the plates like lightning. “I’m lucky.”

At that, a twitchy little smile appeared on Elli’s shrunken mouth. “That you are, Midgardian. Would you like to sleep now?”

Bucky squinted up at the three of him, stationed in a loose semicircle at his bedside. He still felt his own nerves— glimmering in the distance like a heat mirage, always encroaching but never fully formed— but the anxiety had abated enough to let him breathe.

“Yeah,” he answered, closing his eyes. “Thanks.”


	2. Chapter Two

Thor had gone out to the balcony after the other advisors had swept away from the council room. The skyline had beckoned him, speaking to him all the more loudly as the drone of advisors faded away, disappearing further into the palace. And so he had followed the impulse to watch the sky and sun, breathing in the sweetly scented air that drifted up from the gardens below, trying to figure out what was wrong.

He had leaned his arms on the balustrade and looked out at the sprawl of Asgard for a long time, the far-reaches of what was visible having gone especially soft in the slanted afternoon light. Thor had watched for so long and still felt so unsettled, in fact, that he had pulled one of the chairs away from the wall, angling it just right so he could put his feet up on top of the rail instead.

The dreams that plagued him on Earth still haunted him here. Thor would wake to the black of night, eyes still burning with hyperspeed blurs of golden, libidinous excess— black rot, coiling up from the center of the earth— the fetid breath of a starving beast— vicious, poisonous laughter—

 _Ragnarok_.

It was the end of the world that he was afraid of, that dragged him out to this balcony to stare at this doomed paradise. His birthright, his kingdom, his _home_ , wasted by slaughter— foretold centuries before Thor was born, unstoppable.

A burden for a man that didn’t quite know how to be a king, who didn’t know what else to do but hope to drag the answers in from the sunlight and open air.

Elli found him this way sometime later, her slippered feet dragging heavily on the pearly marble and cane tapping raggedly along. Thor stood, and she shuffled her way into his chair, sitting down heavily. She was among the oldest of Asgardians, and one of the few that showed her age.

“Your Midgardian’s treatment is complete,” she said coolly, bright blue eyes studying him.

Thor leaned back against the balustrade. “His third treatment?” he asked, pulling himself back to the demands of the day.

“And last,” Elli said. Her eyes were narrowed, and her lips were pursed up and deeply wrinkled.

The disapproval was written clear across her face— as it had been any other time Bucky was brought up. She hadn’t wanted another Midgardian here. Not so soon after the wreckage of Jane and the dark elves. Not after the death of his mother, who had worked side by side with healers, like Elli, for longer than Thor had been alive. But Thor did not want to think of that, and simply offered a cheerful “Well done.”

“Idunn said he was unwell after the second treatment, which was to be expected. The first treatment was to regenerate the damaged parts of his brain, while the second was more to restore memories. This last treatment should have cleaned up any lingering lesions in his brain. When he wakes, he will no longer be susceptible to any of that so-called conditioning.”

The old woman fell quiet and she, too, looked out over the balcony’s ledge to study the sun-drenched landscape.

“There is no cure for guilt, though,” she said, arthritic fingers twitching atop her cane. “I suspect you know that already.”

Thor turned his head, finding the horizon and squinting into the sun. “Aye,” he agreed after a long moment. “That I know well. But distance and time will help. He’s a good man at heart.”

Elli hummed vaguely, still studying the landscape. She continued to tap her fingers in slow but restless movements, her frown growing more pronounced the longer she sat. Thor waited— he knew she would speak eventually— and she eventually did, meeting Thor’s eyes before she opened her mouth. “Does your father seem well to you, boy?”

“He is healthy, yes,” Thor agreed, slowly.

“But not the same,” Elli mused. “He has been odd since your mother passed.”

Thor was quiet. Asgard ticked on, a watchmaker’s paradise just beyond his reach, and Elli was not wrong.

 

* * *

 

In the early evening, Thor found Bucky at the old Observatory, atop Hvóll, the tallest hill at the perimeter of the city. Bucky’s face looked tired, papery around the eyes and weak at the corners of his plush-mouthed frown. It was a long climb to a forgotten place that had long ago crumbled as the city had grown into itself.

“Long day?” Thor asked, easing down next to Bucky. They sat with their backs to the moss-covered walls, feet pointing down to the city that spilled out beneath the crest of the hill. This view was even more expansive than the one from the palace— the city seemed at once smaller and larger, the details lost in the massive sprawl of a glowing city. The sun was starting to spill downwards, leaking pink and blue along the horizon, and Thor had to wonder if Bucky found it half as beautiful as he himself did.

Bucky shrugged at first, hands set loosely in his lap, palms tipped partway up like a gesture of surrender. Shadow and light gleamed strangely on his one golden hand. “Yeah, guess so,” he said, smiling wryly. “They say I’m cured, though.”

“Fair enough,” Thor acknowledged, before gently steering the conversation to stiller waters. “I haven’t been up here since I was barely a man. Have you come all this way before?”

“Most every day,” Bucky said.

Thor hummed appreciatively. “There were a few summers in my youth when the whole lot of us would come up here most afternoons, to drink weak mead and cause trouble without our mothers scolding us. I had a few issues with electric fires,” Thor confided. “Also the hammer and other weapons. You know, spear throwing in the great hall, borrowing father’s greatsword. A few incidents with the goats, bringing home a bilgesnipe, that sort of thing.”

“I think the kind of trouble you and your friends got into was a little different than what I got up to,” Bucky said, meeting Thor’s eyes for the first time since Thor had climbed up this hill. “Goats?”

“Magic goats,” Thor said. “At least four times the size of any goat on Midgard.”

“God damn,” Bucky said, quietly, but there was a little huff of laughter to his words.

“It’s been decades, at least, since I’ve come up here,” Thor said, turning his neck, trying to peer up to the top of the observatory. He looked back down, meeting Bucky’s questioning gaze. Up close, he could see that Bucky’s eyes were a dark shade of blue, dappled with grey, the sky lightening after an afternoon storm. “How do you feel about climbing?”

Understanding quickly dawned on Bucky’s quizzical face. “Climb the tower?”

“Child’s play,” Thor said, deliberately light. “But good fun,” he added, climbing to his feet. Holding out his left hand, Thor only had to wait for a beat before Bucky grabbed ahold with his metal arm and let himself be hauled to his feet.

The doorway had held strong, the keystone of the arch still holding firm. The interiors had long ago eroded to cut stone and a few pieces of rusted metal and half-fossilized wood beams. If you looked up the tall line of the tower’s interior, you could see straight to where the top level had started to crumble in along one side, weakened by ages of weather and neglect.

Thor paused for a moment, squinting in the shadows, parsing through sun-streaked memories of Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, Sif, and Loki— it had been so long since they were half that carefree, causing harmless trouble, their recklessness of little consequence, just broken bones and black eyes, scrapes and minor stab wounds, burns from the electric impulses Thor couldn’t yet control. Silly tricks from Loki’s magic as he worked to refine it, little tiffs that washed away in a breath of summer air, as formless as little clouds.

Thor stepped closer to a far wall, lifting his hand above his head. He skimmed his hand in an arc over the wall and— “Ah, there we are,” he said, fingers curling into a roughly made hand-hold on memory alone. He released his hand and swept his hand further to the right, and there was another. “Here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder, beckoning Bucky closer with a jerk of his head. Thor could feel Bucky against his side, slipping his arm underneath and fingers slipping into the crevice alongside Thor’s. Bucky was warm, and he smelled sweet and musky, like soap and sweat, clean soft clothes and a little exertion.

After a beat, Thor shifted to the side, making space for Bucky at the wall. “Ready?” Thor asked.

Bucky shifted a little on the balls of his feet— even in the dim lighting, Thor could see the gleam of fading sunlight glance off Bucky’s hair, a high cheekbone. “Alright,” Bucky agreed, and Thor watched the way Bucky’s body seemed to loosen in preparation for the work. “Let’s do it.”

They started out slow, side by side as they picked their way from stone to stone, groping and nudging about for the pattern of conveniently placed grooves for their hands and feet.

“There used to be a staircase,” Thor said. “Narrow, but it spiralled up the walls of the tower, all the way to the top.”

Thor caught Bucky’s eye over their upward-stretched arms. They weren’t quite a third of the way up, their breath coming fast but easy now, their bodies moving faster as they warmed to the work. “Let me guess,” Bucky said, “you broke the staircase somehow, and we all should be glad the whole thing didn’t collapse.”

“Actually, this time it was all Loki. He found out that Sif and I had… well, you know how young men are. He vanished the stairs so we were stuck up on the balcony. Never did put them back.”

“Stuck on the balcony?” Bucky asked, and Thor could hear the sly implication.

“Well, my trousers had been left on the stairs, with Sif’s shirt,” Thor admitted. “They vanished too.”

Bucky laughed at that, grappling with a toe-hold for a moment, and while Thor watched, the lightness of laughter seemed to propel Bucky upwards, reaching further and faster, near to overtaking Thor. It made Thor dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the height— he just liked the sound of Bucky’s laughter, the sweet, low, slightly hoarse chuckle, like it had been muffled and quiet, an unfamiliar sound in Bucky’s pretty mouth. That laugh made Thor keep telling his story as they climbed. “As a prince of Asgard, I had to give her my shirt to wear, of course. I had to jump, _naked_ , from the top of the tower, walk to a nearby farm, and ask for clothes and as much rope as they could spare.”

This time, the laughter was louder, more solid, like it shook out from somewhere inside Bucky’s belly. Bucky’s head ducked as he laughed, that thick brown hair falling over his face.

“And of course, Loki followed along as a witness.”

“He wouldn’t give you anything to wear?”

Thor laughed. Parts of that day he could recall with perfect clarity: the color of Sif’s eyes in the afternoon light and the awkward rush of fucking for the first time, the horrible red flush on Loki’s outraged face and the way just a slash of his hand made the stairs disappear out from under his own feet. “No, of course not. He’d turned himself to a bird, anyway, to watch from a safe distance. He sulked for a while after that. Never did put the stairs back, the bastard.” Thor laughed, but then his throat felt suddenly hot and tight, balled up like a fist. The unfamiliar burden of loss hit him anew, bittersweet and invasive, cutting off the rush of happiness he’d felt at the memory of his brother in one of his moods.

They were halfway up the wall now, and Thor didn’t want to feel this awful way anymore. He wanted the rush of action and competition to drown out the hollow ache of loss, wash it away and replace it with something fresh. Vital.

“What say you?” Thor asked, hanging by a single hand and toe for a moment, twisting to his side to get a better look— they were about halfway, now. “Race to the top?” Thor asked, grabbing back ahold.

Bucky craned his head backwards, lips partly open as he looked up to the fading light streaking in sideways through the crumbling roof. “What the hell,” he said, smiling. “I’m in.”

From there, it was just bodies in motion, ceaseless and rapid as they dragged themselves up, one massive stone at a time. Their breath came faster, harder. The golden arm flashed again and again, and Thor found his eyes were pulled in that direction— he could see the blood flush in Bucky’s cheeks, the short, fine hair sticking to his temples, his cheeks. Through the thin linen, he could see the way all that sleek muscle bunched and moved. The very work of Bucky Barnes, a man that could almost keep pace with a god.

Thor heaved himself onto the balcony just a minute before Bucky, and he was able to watch Bucky prop himself up on his hands and swing a knee up onto the smooth, dark stone. Beneath them, the exposed balcony was warm with residual sunlight and Thor let himself soak the warmth in through his shins for a long moment before they both finally stood up, rolling their shoulders in tandem.

The sun was getting dragged down quickly now, grey blooms spreading towards the horizon line. It made the city’s glow look even greener, the Bifrost shimmering just beyond in faint spills of color that streaked out between the realms. The sight of Asgard had been breathtaking even at the base of the tower, but from the tower, the sight of Asgard in the setting sun was even more luminous.

Between the two of them, the silence was warm and easy, and they stood there at the edge of the observation point in silence for so long that the sun finally sank into the horizon with a final exhalation of blues and pinks. Below them, the creaks and warbles and peeps rose to a crescendo as the night’s creatures stirred to life under the brightening moon.

“God,” Bucky finally murmured. “This place is unreal.”

Inside of himself, Thor could feel his heart swell up, tender like a blister, hot to the touch. Pride that was love and heartsickness, an inextricably tangled knot of himself and the lush, glowing world that had been promised to him in its twilight.

“Yes, it is,” Thor agreed quietly, turning away from the sight below to enjoy the soft wonder on Bucky’s tired face. The lines at the corners of Bucky’s blue eyes didn’t look so deep now, but were instead the fainter, happier crinkles of laughter. His shoulders sloped easily, gold and flesh hands tucked neatly into his trouser pockets.

Bucky walked closer to the edge of the balcony. The rails had long ago crumbled to uneven stumps, and Bucky leaned over, seeming to peer at the ground.

“Still light enough to see the grass,” Bucky said, straightening. “What do you say?”

Thor grinned, strolling closer to stop at Bucky’s side. “How far do you reckon you can jump, Midgardian?”

“I’m no god of thunder, but I think I can manage.”

They backed up a couple of steps. Thor could feel his body tighten in anticipation, muscles tightening in his core. It was more than just a physical response— there was something else, an edge of excitement that felt like the bright wonder of being young again. “Let’s see how you do, then,” Thor challenged.

There was only an indrawn breath, the flex of his thighs— and then they were running, dodging the crumbling edge as they leapt out into the deepening grey.

Their fall was endless and impossibly quick all at once, the air rushing past, the shock of his own laughter. It was reckless and stupid— and yet the ground, draped with long grass, wasn’t that hard as they crashed into it, rolling into their twin falls, tumbling forward into graceless heaps.

Sprawled out as they were, barely a handbreadth apart, Thor could hear Bucky panting as well, their quick and shallow breaths slowing out in patient drags. The grass was still faintly warm beneath them, the long days of summer dragging their warmth well into the night. And above them, the sky was darkening just enough to reveal the glimmer of endless starlight. At his feet, he could see Asgard, white light spiderwebbed with faint streaks of black for the lightless streets and homes.

Thor reached out, grabbing ahold of Bucky’s forearm. Under his hand, the gold was warm. He felt like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. Thor didn’t know when, but they had turned their faces from the sky to look at each other.

Bucky spoke before Thor had a chance to drag any words together. “Thank you,” Bucky said.

It was true that Thor had never mastered all the subtleties of weaving words the way Loki had— but he knew enough that _you are welcome_ was somehow inadequate. Only half of it. “I should thank you,” Thor answered. “It’s been a long time since I’ve come up here. I’d forgotten…” he murmured, trailing off.

But it must have been enough. “Yeah,” Bucky said, his voice little more than a breath.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Thor was alone in Vanaheim, the sun slowly climbing upwards into a white sky. Vanaheim was even brighter than Asgard, but the colors were less rich, the clouds tinted less vividly as they blew across the sky. The wind was warm, wafting the scent of fresh bread and meat, spices and tea down the narrow market streets. The Vanir language danced in the air, melodious and rich. A reminder of his mother’s own soft accent.

Odin had given him a veritable list of tasks to manage in Vanaheim, including locating a few rare books from an obscure antiquities dealer. And if Loki were still alive— well, Thor would’ve gladly pawned the job off on him and went off to find the nearest distillery and everyone would’ve been happy.

Stepping into the low-slung doorway of the book seller’s shop, Thor had to clear his throat with a cough, another solid shock of loss rushing to greet him. The smell of dust and crumbling paper hung thickly, practically visible in the thin lighting; even in the weak light, the sheer number of books was overwhelming— stacked almost floor to ceiling, shelf after shelf. A maze of them, with haphazard placards tacked up here and there, corners bent and ink fading.

God, Loki would’ve happily gotten lost in here, heedless of the dust smearing his black clothes and sticking to his hair. Jane, too, judging by the solid wall of texts about the stars.

They would’ve loved it, and Thor wanted nothing more than to return to the open air market, to walk through happy crowds, to look up and see the sun as it swam towards its zenith.

The shopkeeper was a narrow little man with watery eyes and drab clothes— a mousy man that disappeared back into his shop the moment Thor handed over a list written in Odin’s own spidery script.

“I suppose I’ll just wait here,” he told a shelf.

There was no reason to stand there and stare at a collection of terrible poetry books, though, so Thor slowly wandered the cramped aisles, distractedly swaying Mjolnir by the wrist strap as he skimmed spine after spine on the shelves. Most of what was out here seemed common enough, familiar titles in serviceable editions— anything of value was probably found on the other side of that same door the shopkeeper had disappeared behind.

After what felt like ages, Thor found himself in front of a sagging shelf of children’s books: thin volumes with colorful pages, crammed in every which way. The shelf was low to the ground— likely overlooked by adults but the perfect height for curious toddlers to find. He gently set Mjolnir down on the dirty floor, and squatted to better look. Some were storybooks he remembered faintly from his own childhood, his mother’s musical alto reciting fairy tales while he and Loki were curled on either side of her, jealously guarding their half of her lap and pulling at her gown until their chubby fingers threatened to rip the seams. The Vanir tales— the stories of his mother’s people— were achingly familiar, and he lingered over them, pulling book after book off the shelf.

Under a stack of dwarven books, there was a slender volume of fairy tales. Colorful drawings flowed from page to page, weaving in and out of the words, conjuring up the story almost as though it were magicked. The gilt edges had dulled, and the corners had long ago gone soft, but it was the wear of a well-loved book, outgrown and let go, in the hopes that another might love it half as much.

Thor tucked the other children’s books back onto the shelves as best he could, the collection of fairy tales still in hand when he stood up from his crouch. He should’ve put it back as well, but didn’t. Instead, he thought of the small, plain squareness of Bucky’s tidy cottage, his small collection of belongings arranged in neat little rows. He thought of the stories Steve told, two boys laying side by side in a trundle bed, sharing books and blankets as winter howled through Brooklyn.

He could’ve put the book back, but didn’t.

Much later, he left the bookshop with a small fortune in books— rare ones, stinking of magic and rife, he was certain, with prophecy and admonition, grim enough to put even himself on edge. But wrapped separately, a little parcel all its own, was the book of fairytales. A gleam of brightness and color that left Thor feeling hopeful.

The sunlight was bright, and Thor squinted when he was finally loosed back out into the white light and fresh air. He glanced down and paused, thoughtful and strangely heartened.

Along the knee of his black trousers was a thick streak of dust.

 

* * *

 

It seemed Bucky had found new pillowcases— they were a bit old fashioned for Thor’s taste, faded white linen with jewel tone rosettes and flowers in blues and purples and pinks. Little roosters with three flouncing tail feathers adorned each floppy corner.

The pillows were propped up against the headboard, two fat puffs of color against the relative starkness of Bucky’s bedroom. It was almost out of place, but there was something nice about them. Cheerful. Thor didn’t fight the impulse and sat back against Bucky’s headboard, pulling one of the pillows over to study the embroidery. Under his fingers, the thread felt like silk, each stitch carefully made.

“Found those in a secondhand shop a couple blocks up,” Bucky said, looking up from where he sat on the bedroom floor, carefully prying bent nails out of a loose floor board. “My ma had stuff like that, from her mother. We were never allowed to touch it, and it was all going to go to my little sister, Rebecca, when she got married.”

Bucky set the bent nails in a little pile at his side, carefully corralling them before they could roll away. Thor was impressed all over again with the dexterity of the golden arm, the way each motion was smooth and subtle, the high sheen of certain plates catching the light, while others had a brushed finish, their reflection dulled but no less eye-catching. “Had to get a couple stains out, but they look good now.”

“I couldn’t tell,” Thor said honestly, setting the pillow back at his side and patting it back to shape.

He remained quiet while Bucky hammered the floorboard back into place, holding the board steady with his golden arm while his right swung the hammer. One nail and then another, and then Bucky leaned back, two spare nails pinched between his lips. Thor could see the scrutiny on Bucky’s face, but it wasn’t bad. Just… thoughtful.

“I forgot to tell you,” Thor said, sitting up a little and reaching for his leather satchel. “I brought you something from Vanaheim.”

Bucky’s dark brows were drawn together when Thor pulled out the book of fairytales, wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper. Thor held out the package and Bucky walked over, taking the package and turning it over in his hands, studying the chintzy ribbon that held it shut.

“What is it?” Bucky asked, and he sounded hushed and confused.

Thor reached out— and he didn’t mean for his touch to linger, but it did anyway— and squeezed Bucky’s hip, enjoying the strong shape of him, the obvious muscle under his leather trousers. “Open it,” he said, drawing his hand away and unable to stop his thumb from a last lingering swipe over the firm bulge of a hip bone.

Bucky opened the package carefully, unknotting the ribbon and looping it around his metal hand before parting the wrappings to see the book underneath.

“Oh,” Bucky said, his voice even quieter now, solemn and awed as his Midgardian hand, the soft human part of him, traced over the gold embossed lettering on the cover. He handled the book gently. Reverent, even, as his fingers traced the whorls of a watercolor cloud. “Thor— I—”

“I had one like it when I was a child, just learning my runes,” Thor said, “They’re the fairytales of my mother’s people. The art is unlike anything from Asgard.”

Bucky carefully flipped the book open, paging delicately. Familiar tales called out to Thor, the little bits and pieces played out by flowing ink drawings, the text parting gently around the many illustrations. Between them, Thor could sense the same sort of held-breath quiet of children hushed, waiting to hear what happens next.

Thor broke the silence, needing to speak, to fill the eager hollow in his own belly, unnerved by the easy give and take shared quiet. “I have found that many tales in the nine realms bear a fair resemblance to each other. It's strange comfort, to know that we are perhaps not so different after all.”

Bucky paused, and Thor looked down to see a dark-haired maiden offering a sword to a flaxen-haired warrior. The other side of the page was a tale Thor knew to be familiar to them both: kingship gifted by a mysterious woman, though whether by divine right, luck, or something else entirely, Thor no longer felt so certain. He watched Bucky’s golden thumb gently swipe over the place where the man waited on bended knee, accepting without yet knowing the cost.

“Arthur,” Bucky said.

Thor hummed. “Is that what you call him?”

Bucky huffed a laugh. “What do you call him?” he asked, slowly sitting at the edge of the bed, close enough that their thighs brushed. Thor leaned over, taking half the cover in his own hands.

“Here,” Thor said, pointing out the runes at the top of the page. “Let me show you.”


	3. Chapter Three

A routine spun itself to smooth ease with the cycle of long, summery days in Asgard.

These days, Bucky woke just before the sun. There was time enough to wash his face and brush his hair, to weave a few small braids in before a breakfast of bread and fruit. Then he took a lazy walk down to the eastern side of the palace, where the kennels and stables sprawled out before a vast array of fields, fenced and free alike.

It had taken him a while to make the braids sleek and narrow, like Thor’s. His fingers had felt stiff and clumsy, and vanity and pride had been the only reason he kept at it. That, and the pleased smile Thor gave him when he saw Bucky’s earliest efforts, running thick fingers over the woven hair with a surprising softness. Something inside of Bucky had shaken awake at that simple touch— it had been innocent, gentle, with no intention but kindness.

Now Bucky wore one or two braids at a time, pleased every time Thor tweaked them or even just let his gaze linger on Bucky’s hair, the fall of it against his neck or face. He hadn’t been thinking of it at the time, but now he was glad he’d let his hair grow to his shoulders— the length of his hair, his braids, it all made him blend into the scenery in Asgard. The arm was fairly eye-catching, but not the way it had been on Earth.

Getting up, going to work, walking through the city streets… it was so exquisitely _normal_. It felt good, like setting down a heavy weight and carrying on without it. He could find the whispers of his old self, the man that walked down to the waterfront every morning to sling crates at the docks, and spent the whole walk home cheerfully picking the splinters from his skin. That man from Brooklyn didn’t feel dead and gone in quite the same way anymore.

The day always started early, when the skyline still blushed pink around the rising sun, dew lingering on the grass. Much of his day was spent in the kennels among the massive hounds— sweeping the floors and laying fresh straw; slopping fresh water into the many troughs and doling out food with minimal scrapping. For the hunting dogs, he would brush burrs and dried mud from their wiry fur; the youngest litter of puppies were taken to the small pen where they could romp in the sunshine until he had to carry their tiny sleeping bodies back into the kennels.

There was a kennel master— Tyr, an even tempered man that was often busy with arranging hunts and training the older puppies for work— but Bucky was largely left to his own devices. Keep the dogs clean and fed, keep them entertained and exercised. He was often the only one in the kennels for hours at a time, but with puppies under foot and big hounds pressing their noses right into his belly, he was never really alone. After a couple of months, the work was now comfortably familiar and the dogs knew him, whiplike tails wagging at the sight of him, curling their bodies against him when he sat with them, licking at his fingers and clothes when they wanted attention.

Most days, Bucky’s work was done just after he cleaned up their meal in the early evening, which left him more than enough time for walks out to the observatory or the green, or back to his home to spend a night with his journals. Thor was often busy during the day, or off-planet entirely, but every few nights, sometimes every other night, Bucky found himself at the root of the old observatory tower, watching Thor instead of the city below or the stars above.

The past few nights, Thor had been away, managing business at his father’s behest. From what little Thor said of his father, it seemed like Odin had been handing over more and more of his responsibilities to his son, grooming him for the throne. Thor was confident, as always, but there was a soft core of thoughtfulness that lived somewhere underneath, and Bucky was seeing it more and more clearly every day.

Bucky hoped that he would be back tonight. Quiet had become too quiet without Thor around.

The morning went by quickly enough— two of the biggest sighthounds had to be bathed until they no longer smelled of swamp, and mats needed to be clipped from their fur. One dog submitted patiently to his grooming, but the other cried the whole time, trying to wriggle out of the great copper bath, his soapy body slipping out of Bucky’s hands again and again. It left Bucky feeling damp and impatient, but then the dog sprawled across his thighs after, sleepily permitting Bucky to brush his fur until he shone, and Bucky wondered why he’d ever been impatient with so sweet a dog.

He ate his lunch outside while the puppies clambered up onto his lap, tumbling off just as quickly as they came, tugged loose by one sibling or another. It was a fairly large litter, ten puppies at once, and they were old enough now that the mother gladly let Bucky take her voracious, excitable brood out to play without her supervision.

These puppies were much smaller than the sighthounds, bred instead for work in the fields with fast, compact bodies and thicker fur. The mother was a good looking dog, only coming up to his knee, but the puppies were still growing in funny spurts that left them with fat little bellies and spindly legs, short little muzzles and puffy puppy fur. They were practically tireless, with quick moving minds and needle-sharp teeth and claws, but for the most part, the ever-moving sprawl of them entertained itself, cheerfully biting and growling, tumbling and rolling right until they dropped off to sleep.

There was one puppy that liked to follow Bucky around, barking and growling at Bucky’s boots and scrabbling sharp little nails on Bucky’s pant legs. If Bucky sat down with the puppies as they lolled about their pen, he would climb into Bucky’s lap and fell asleep against Bucky’s legs, his tiny, dense body throwing a lot of heat. The puppy was a mouthy thing, unafraid to demand Bucky’s attention, and sometimes Bucky carried out all his work with his right arm, the puppy calmly sprawled down the tireless length of Bucky’s golden forearm. He was the only puppy that Bucky had named.

Sure enough, by the time Bucky had polished off his hand pie, the puppy found its way to his lap, flopping down with a massive sigh. The puppy licked at the knee of Bucky’s pants until Bucky waved a stick under his nose. “Here, Hullabaloo,” he murmured, “play with this instead.”

They whiled away the afternoon like that. While the puppies snored on next to their dozing mother, Bucky let the big dogs out into the yard to run and he sat in a warm patch of sun, carefully waxing the leather collars and harnesses until they were shining, supple and soft. It was slow work, maybe a little tedious, but the sun was warm, the wax smelled faintly of lavender, and the hounds ran and rolled through the grass, streaks of grey darting around each other so gracefully it was almost like it was choreographed.

The hounds were all happy and tired by the time Bucky got them all settled into their kennels, and a legion of tails happily beat against the floor, sending up clouds of straw, as he went around with their dinners. Then it was time to clean up the empty bowls, fill the water troughs, and leave for the night.

Tyr hadn’t returned just yet, but things were quiet enough that it wouldn’t matter if Bucky took Hullabaloo with him to the stables for a little bit. The puppy was already sitting at the gate of his kennel stall, watching Bucky in anticipation, little head tipped to one side and long-haired ears flopping around. The puppy had already cottoned onto Bucky’s schedule and wasn’t about to be left behind.

“C’mere, Baloo,” Bucky said, scooping the puppy up and tucking his fat, warm little body into the crook of his golden elbow. “Let’s go visit the horses.”

The whole walk down to the stable, Baloo kept his floppy ears perked up, his head moving as if on a swivel. His little feet dangled and waddled in the air, as if he could chase each barn cat that darted across their path, each horse that galloped in the sprawling pasture in the distance. He barked a couple of times, and Bucky gently jostled him, shushing him so he wouldn’t spook the horses with that shrill bark of his.

“We’re going to visit Astrid,” Bucky murmured, looking down at where Baloo was trying to lick his wrist. “So you can’t be a loudmouth, pal, or she’ll bite you.”

The kennels were well made, of course, with dark wood and plenty of wide, short windows along the roofline, letting light and fresh air through— but the stables were something else. Enormous wooden beams held the whole thing together, wide planks of rich wood that glowed under the light that streamed in from wide, tall windows that vaulted upwards towards the pitched roof. The stalls were roomy, their doors trimmed with beautifully hammered iron and a nameplate for each horse. Everything was a series of golden light and tawny shadow, dust drifting lazily through the air and the puffing breaths and happy little sounds of well-kept horses echoing against the wood.

Bucky shifted the puppy, draping Hullabaloo over his shoulder so he could look at all the horses as they walked by. He could feel Hullabaloo’s fur brush his ear and neck, his bony little elbows digging into Bucky’s shoulder as the puppy wiggled to chase the view. The stalls at the front of the stable were nearly all full— gorgeous horses with bright, round eyes and sturdy bodies, shining manes and clean hair.

There were empty stalls, all in a row, and then in the last stall on the left, there was a single horse. Or, maybe it was more than horse, somehow grander and larger than the others of the stable, older, with sad, dark eyes— and, unbelievably, a set of wide, white wings. They were feathered, like a great bird’s wings, sleek and muscular and utterly entracing.

Baloo wiggled and Bucky shifted him again, draping him back over his golden arm so the puppy could see Astrid. Of course, Baloo barked, and the horse’s ears swiveled forward, tracking the sharp sound. The horse stuck her nose over the door of her stall, snuffling curiously, and Bucky slowly reached forward with the back of his hand. He let her nudge her nose against his fingers for a long moment before he took the liberty of petting her long, soft face. “Hello, pretty girl,” Bucky whispered. “I brought you a visitor.”

The grooms had cautioned him that Astrid might take some warming up, and that he shouldn’t be too offended if she tried to take a bite out of him— she was old beyond measure, and she didn’t like most people, and liked the other horses even less. In Bucky’s case, it had taken a lot of sweet carrots and sugar lumps, and double that in patience, but she seemed to like him well enough these days.

Astrid was the last of her kind— she’d been around for longer than any of the grooms could remember, so long that no one could exactly recall where she had come from, to begin with. They knew enough to tell him that, at one time, there had been many Valkyries, and they had been the fiercest of all Asgardians. Mighty and strong, brave and always victorious. They wore blue and gold, and rode white horses with magnificent wings. One day, they existed and then— they were gone.

As for Astrid herself— there were stories that Frigga had found her wandering the fields when all the Valkyries had gone. Or that Odin himself had returned from a field of dead warriors with nothing save for a wounded horse. That last one could’ve been true as any of the other stories. She was clearly a war horse, with scars of all shapes and sizes dotting her broad frame. Or perhaps they were just injuries from being alone and untended, wandering in search of her own kind. At the end of the day, there was no consensus, just elaborate yarns of hearsay.

All Bucky knew for sure was that she was alone. The Valkyries and their winged mounts were gone, save for Astrid.

After a while, Astrid nudged his fingers forcefully, craning her neck towards him, and Bucky rolled his eyes but reached into his pocket anyway. She happily slurped the hard, dark lump of sugar from his palm, and puffed cheerfully at him as he started to pet her again.

“Can you say hello to Hullabaloo?” Bucky asked, his hand working in smooth strokes over her long neck. Her wings ruffled a little before settling back against her sides, sleek feathers gleaming like iridescent scales. “I know, he’s very loud, sweetheart. He just wants to say hello, he’s very curious.”

Truthfully, Baloo had passed curious to outright excited, wriggling as forcefully as his pudgy body could muster and digging sharp little toes into Bucky’s side, trying to walk through air to get to that horse. His whine was small and thin, but piercing, like a needle, and Bucky jostled him a bit as he brought him a little closer to Astrid. “Now, be nice,” he warned. “She’s a lot tougher than you or me, pal.”

Slowly, he brought Baloo forward, letting him see her without quite bringing him close enough to take a bite out of. Bucky held his breath while Astrid sniffed, her great nose and long face stretched forward to inhale the scent of straw and puppy, and Baloo wiggled a bit in his grasp, straining to touch her long face with his own tiny little nose. Astrid surprised them both, nickering low and loud. Like she was pleased to meet him. She tossed her head and reached forward again, her pretty, long neck straining so she could whuff a solid warm breath against where Bucky’s hands were wrapped around Baloo’s chubby belly. Baloo held surprisingly still and stared at Astrid like he was awe-struck the way Bucky was, and it felt like a moment of dumb wonder and certainty, like a couple of stars in the universe lined up just so, to make something good.

“She must like you, little pipsqueak,” Bucky said, tucking Baloo back into the crook of his gold elbow. He held Baloo tight against his body, and the little thing must have been getting tired, because he didn’t protest. Reaching out with his right hand, he rubbed Astrid’s strong shoulder. “Thanks for being so nice, sweetheart,” he said, looking into her great dark eyes. Bucky didn’t think he was kidding himself when it seemed like she looked back at him, too, her eyes somehow more knowing than a regular horse’s.

Astrid let herself be pet for another handful of moments before something caught her attention, ears pricked forward and nose swinging towards the stable door. Bucky followed the motion, and there, his great shape blocking the golden afternoon light, was Thor.

Bucky couldn’t help but hold his breath as Thor walked closer, only pausing to scratch a lingering barn cat where it dozed across a stall door. Thor’s red cape was gone today, he saw. Instead, it was just a comfortable-looking brown shirt, hair slightly tangled around his shoulders. There was something welcoming in the absence of all that thick leather and metal armor— there was always something oddly soft and sweet about Thor, like his size and strength were only part of his kindness, but it was suddenly overwhelming in a way that made Bucky’s belly twist into helpless knots. Bucky wanted nothing more than to press his face to one of those impossibly huge shoulders, to inhale against Thor’s strong neck, to let that blond hair kiss his face.

It was an aching want that maybe some part of Bucky wanted to turn away from, wanted to ignore until dissatisfaction wore away to something more like half-forgotten nothingness. After decades of suppression, the idea of so much naked want, clamoring upwards to the surface of his skin— it made him pull Baloo up to his face so he could blush and not be seen.

“Tyr said I might find you here,” Thor said, now close enough to put one of his own big hands on Astrid’s neck. Bucky could see the effortless way she leaned into him, wholly comfortable with Thor’s fingers rifling through her mane. “I’ve just returned from Vanaheim, thought you might care to join me for dinner.”

Hullabaloo chose that moment to insert himself— he looked right at Thor and barked, a sharp demand.

“Ah, one of the puppies!” Thor looked delighted at the little noisemaker. “May I?” he asked, holding out a hand.

Bucky grinned as he handed Baloo over, the puppy’s little feet kicking in the air for a moment before he was settled against the broad side of Thor’s ribs. “That’s Baloo,” he told Thor, and the dog looked upwards at the sound of his name, not barking or whining, but making a happy little groaning sound, reedier and higher-pitched than the sound his mother made.

“Baloo?”

“Short for Hullabaloo,” Bucky said. “On account of how mouthy he is.”

Thor laughed at that, jostling the puppy and making him bark in obvious delight. “Tyr said you’re quite good with them. I believe it.”

“It’s not hard,” Bucky said, deflecting. It was impossible to put into words the warmth that had filled his belly at Thor’s casual praise. “It’s good work,” he said, looking back at Astrid and distracting himself with combing a tangle from her mane. “I really appreciate you getting this job for me.”

Thor gently set the wriggling puppy on the floor of the stable, squatting down and waggling a long piece of hay in front of Baloo’s boxy paws, moving just slightly too fast for Baloo to catch. “It agrees with you,” Thor said. “It’s good to see you so at peace.”

Bucky didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, his cheeks warm. He just watched the way Thor kept Baloo dancing from side to side as he waggled the straw. “Ah,” Thor said, letting Baloo snatch away the piece of straw, little teeth already gnawing away, “that reminds me.” Thor stood, and rummaged around in his pockets, drawing out a few loose odds and ends before coming up with a drawstring pouch, maybe the size of Bucky’s palm. He opened it and tipped its contents into Bucky’s waiting palm.

Seeds. A variety of them, little misshapen lumps in shades of brown and black. They were warm from being inside of Thor’s pocket, and they filled Bucky’s palm close to overflowing.

“Vanir wildflowers,” Thor explained. “They grow quickly.” One of Thor’s hands slid under Bucky’s, cupping it, and with his other hand, he dragged a single thick finger through the seeds, spreading them across Bucky’s palm. “This one,” he said, pointing to a black seed, “is like a poppy, and this,” he said, dragging his finger across the creases of Bucky’s palm to a little brown one, “is more like a daisy. The flowers of Vanaheim are extraordinary, great fields of every color you can think of. I wanted you to see them.”

Bucky looked up and realized, with a great squeeze of his heart, that Thor was watching him, their heads bent close together and those blue eyes lit up with the golden light that slid over Thor’s massive shoulders like a mantle. He couldn’t breathe at the look of Thor, the soft, open wonder of his face, the way Thor cradled his hand so gently. They were mere inches apart, close enough that Bucky could breathe in the happy warmth of citrus and cedar that clung subtly to Thor, a natural musk that only made Bucky want to lean in closer.

When was the last time he felt this— this _want_ so uncomplicatedly? Was it when he was sixteen and he and Steve would sleep out on the living room floor, jammed side to side between the kitchen table and the sofa? Was it when he was barely into his twenties and sleeping rough next to Steve’s new, big body, wrapped together for warmth against the strange wilderness of Europe?

Or maybe that had always been complicated, because Steve was a want that he let live only buried far down under his ribs, right in the tough muscle of his heart. A thing that was safe only if it went unspoken.

Maybe this was the first uncomplicated thing Bucky had ever really wanted, wanted right down to his bones. Every other encounter in his past had been rushed, the men all but faceless, blurring into soft, smears of memory that lasted no longer than it took to get off and pull his pants back up again.

This was like Steve, but not like Steve at all, and Bucky didn’t know what to make of it.

Thor let go of Bucky’s hand slowly, dragging his fingers away like the whole world was moving slower than usual. He helped Bucky scrape the seeds back into the pouch, not losing a single one of the many.

Bucky felt a little nervous when he tucked the little bag into his own pocket, reluctantly pulling his fingers away. The moment had drifted away, no longer keeping him pinned under Thor’s gaze, and he felt a rush of regret followed by a wave of relief. It was too much to think of, so he looked down and found Baloo between their feet, sprawled out on his side and fast asleep.

“I think we’ve tired him out,” Bucky whispered, bending down to scoop the puppy up slowly.

“We can take him back to Tyr and get supper,” Thor said, his voice softer than usual.

Bucky took a moment to give Astrid another pat, rubbing his hand over her soft nose. “See you tomorrow, sweetheart. Maybe I’ll see about getting you some carrots.” She nudged affectionately at his shoulder as he left, huffing a little in goodbye.

Thor stopped to visit the same tomcat again, a giant thing that was bigger than Baloo, with long, dense fur and little white tufts sticking out of his pointed ears. He was mostly brown stripes, but his chest was a great splash of white, with little bits of hay stuck to his fur. “Hello, Kattarauga.” Thor looked to Bucky as he scratched under the cat’s chin. “He was my mother’s favorite.”

The cat yawned, revealing massive teeth and his rough tongue. The cat licked Thor’s hand and stretched, looking disdainfully at Bucky before flicking his tail and stalking off along the stall door frames, gracefully skipping down the narrow ledge.

“Think I like dogs better,” he said, and Thor shrugged, still smiling as they left the stables.

Tyr was in the kennels when they returned, Geri and Freki trailing behind him like massive black shadows. The wolves were even bigger than the hunting hounds, denser and broader, with long shaggy hair and eerie bright eyes that seemed to see everything. They circled Thor, their heads higher than his elbows, and pressed their faces to his belly, seeking attention the same as any pup.

“They are still here with you?” Thor asked, patting the two beasts like they were old friends. The wolves never spent the day in the kennels— they seemed to have a routine all their own, wandering in and out, generally following Tyr around or racing on their own through the open pasture.

“They spend most days with me, now,” Tyr replied, shrugging. “Odin doesn’t seem much interested in them, either.”

Thor did not reply, and Bucky gently returned Baloo, only half-awake, to the pen with his mother and littermates. He left a quick kiss against Baloo’s head before settling him in the straw. “Good night, Baloo. See you tomorrow,” he promised quietly. He always felt a pang of regret to leave him here at night, even if he knew the puppy was happier in a warm pile with his brothers and sisters.

There was still a bit of sun in the sky as they left the kennels behind, and they wandered side-by-side up the slow-sloping path to the city proper.

“I probably smell like wet dog,” Bucky warned as he followed Thor towards the tavern, but Thor just slung an arm over his shoulder and pulled him close, their steps wandering into each other’s way as Thor turned his face to Bucky’s hair and breathed in.

“Not at all,” Thor said, their faces very close together. “Besides, I reek of travel. We’re quite a pair, you and I.”

Bucky felt a flash of wonder and longing at the desire that rose within him, too quick to be squashed down: that they were two old lovers, kept apart for a few days but now happy to be together again, that they would go eat together out in public and not feel worry or shame, and they would go back to their home and make love in their bed until true dark had fallen, and only then would they give into sleep.

“This way,” Thor said, and Bucky hid a shiver at the way Thor guided him with a light touch to the small of his back, steering him towards a small tavern on a cobbled street corner. “You’ll like it here. Simple and hearty. Excellent beer.”

Inside, it was busy but not so loud they couldn’t hear each other when they sank into chairs around a thick wooden slab of a table.

“So where did you go this time? Just Vanaheim?” Bucky asked when they were settled, Thor’s big feet sprawling under the table and nudging against Bucky’s ankles.

Thor sighed. “Svartalfheim, but that was a short trip. Jotunheim, simply the worst place in all the known universe. Then Vanaheim, which was lovely. Quiet. It’s good to be home,” Thor said. Maybe it was the sallow lighting of the bar, or maybe it was just that Thor’s face was tired, his eyes crinkling softly and his smile not quite as sunny— golden, sure, but like an autumn sun rather than the brightness of summer.

A woman came over to their table with a smile and a pencil, and Bucky gestured for Thor to order— and he did, listing off half a dozen things and then ale to wash it down with. She was still scribbling down the order as she walked away.

“You’ve been gone a lot lately,” Bucky said when they were left alone.

“It seems there is unrest everywhere these days,” Thor said, his voice light but his eyes looked darker than usual. He lapsed into silence, and rubbed at his chin for a moment, looking off into the crowded dining hall. Bucky could see the width of Thor’s fingers, the way some knuckles were swollen from probably near-constant abuse, faint silvery scars that could be centuries old. Bucky waited, but Thor just shook his head and looked back at Bucky, a slow smile spreading across his face as he put an arm down on the table, leaning back in his chair at a lazy angle, one thigh spread wide.

“You look like a proper Asgardian,” Thor said, looking pleased. “Braids and all.”

The compliment bloomed inside of Bucky, a hothouse flower fed on the heat of Thor’s gaze. Bucky’s heart felt like it was beating in his ears; the hot, humid throb of his own body was as foreign as anything else on Asgard, maybe more so. “Don’t think this is all what I had in mind, when you first offered to bring me up here,” Bucky said. “But I’m glad I’m here. Asgard is— it’s something else.”

“She is,” Thor agreed. “Nothing else in this universe is quite like her.”

Their beer came, and the glass was cool to the touch, the amber liquid within cloudy and sharp tasting. “You’re like Steve?” Thor asked. “The alcohol on your planet isn’t strong enough?” When Bucky nodded, Thor grinned, wolfish. “You’ll like this, then.”

And Bucky did— the beer made him feel warm in a way he’d forgotten, the stiff joints of himself suddenly made pliant. It was like being a kid in a dancehall, again, carefree— careless— living on the varnish and veneer of his own life, the beer yeasty and cheap, but the music loud and the crush of bodies there to hold him up. Only now, it was just him and Thor, sharing a beer with their legs pressed together under the table, and Bucky had never thought he’d have this again.

While they were waiting for their food, they talked in great circular loops, meandering through their days apart and the things they had seen. Thor had more to say, of course, but he was as easy as anything to listen to. Thor was funny— he couldn’t seem to help but pepper all his stories with not-so-little boasts and brags, but that was surface. There was something earnest— keen, even— about the way Thor described the rock-like ice palaces of Jotunheim, great sharp spires that seemed to rise out of the permafrost like claws, ominous blue-grey against dark wintry skies. Over plates of buttery-soft roasted meat and herbed vegetables, salted and flaking fish, and loaves of oven-fresh bread,Thor talked about the way the cold of Jotunheim was sneaky, lancing you through any gap in your clothes, ice spreading until your arms and legs felt numb and thick, until even your warm breath on your fingers felt useless. The food was warm in Bucky’s belly but he felt the cold, too, to hear Thor talk of it.

Over bowls of soft fruit and whipped cream, and dark mead served in deep glass goblets, Bucky heard about the blush softness of Vanaheim, the way spring seemed to linger in the air with the breath of flowers and the crisp, cool air. Idyllic in a way that seemed somehow more foreign than the bitter cold of Jotunheim— music in the streets, flowering trees casting shade over glittering stone sidewalks.

“Is there winter in Asgard?” Bucky asked. The plates were stacked in front of them, their cups only half-full now, and they lingered over the last of their honey wine, like they had lingered over their meals, dragging out each course so they never felt over-full. At some point, they had slouched back into their seats, their knees touching comfortably, carelessly, under the cover of the table. Thor’s thigh was a solid weight against the side of his knee, and he was just loose enough with drink to press into the feeling without thinking anything other than how good it felt.

Thor pressed back, even warmer now. “All four seasons,” Thor answered. “Jotunheim is always too cold, Vanaheim too warm, for a proper turning of the seasons. But Asgard turns, and turns fiercely. It will be fall in a month’s time, and the leaves will wither and be shaken down by the rain. And one morning we will wake to find a blanket of snow, and all of Asgard will be shivering, the skies dark with low clouds, the sun dim, until spring returns for us at last. Our summers are robust— you’ve seen the crops, the fat livestock. It sustains us well when the dark comes.”

“Like New York,” Bucky said. “God. It gets so cold in the winter. The wind comin’ off the water, rattling right through our windows. Slush in the streets, ice. But our summers would get even warmer than here, so humid it felt like you were swimming, just trying to breathe. Most nights it’d never get any cooler, either. I remember when it got real bad, just lyin’ there, dreaming about great blocks of ice until you could maybe fall asleep.”

Thor paid for their meal, more of those lightweight metal coins that Bucky had learned to recognize now that the grandmotherly woman in the cottage next door had explained them to him one by one.

When they stepped out of the tavern and down into the street, Bucky had to blink a little, trying to adjust to the night sky and the little halos of street lights that dotted their path. The streets weren’t empty, but they had quieted to only a few passersby and little crowds in front of the taverns or theatres.

“Let me walk you home,” Thor said, his fingers gliding over from Bucky’s elbow to the small of his back, a full-bodied touch of his whole hand settling against Bucky, burning hot even through his clothes. There was almost a shiver that ran through Bucky’s body, but it was more like a roll of heat, a wash of pressure— heat lightning, no rain, just twilight and clouds and something bright in the distance, lingering at the edge of his periphery, threat and wonder all at once.

Bucky’s fingers brushed the outside seam of Thor’s pants— almost an accident, with how close they were standing. “That’d be nice,” he said, tipping his head up to meet Thor’s eyes, wanting to be sincere. “Thank you.”

The walk back to Bucky’s little house was a game Bucky remembered well: friendly touches that bordered on the limits of too much and too far. It was surprisingly easy to drag back recollections of being nervous and horny, scared and happy all at once, daring to take chances with a man that wanted the same secret things he did. The conversation was easy but not mindless, an ebb and flow that made it easy for Bucky to gesture by running his hand down Thor’s forearm, to let Thor nudge his shoulder as they laughed.

“I am impressed,” Thor said. They were walking slowly, probably slower than they needed to. “Tyr must trust you greatly to leave them with you so often.”

Bucky shrugged, but he knew the pleasure at the compliment must’ve shown on his face, because Thor’s smile deepened. “Always liked them,” he replied. “Never got to have one, not living in a tenement like that. Couldn’t afford one, even if we had the space.”

“You’ve learned quickly, then.”

In the distance, they could see the unlit face of Bucky’s house, quiet flowers with closed faces sleeping in the sparse beds out front. The houses nearby were in similar states— just little blooms of yellow light here and there, faint illuminations of shadow strangers puttering around in their homes. “I used to be real personable. Could get along with anyone. But now I like the dogs better.” Bucky caught Thor’s eye and smiled, one side of his mouth curling up. “You’re not so bad, though.”

Thor smiled back, and they walked up to Bucky’s front door in warm silence. It was somehow a familiar itch, to want so badly to reach out and slide his hand into Thor’s warm grip, to want to pull him closer or squeeze his hand. Suspense lived in the rapid patter of Bucky’s heart, somehow sitting higher in his chest, deepening the heated flush of his cheeks and crowding his lungs.

Asgard was a place for second chances. Bucky had a new arm, untainted by violence. His memories had been exhumed and then reinterred if not exactly gently, at least neatly. His job was just caretaking and affection, and it was repaid to him in spades.

Bucky knew that this would not last forever— nothing could last, nothing so good or easy or peaceful. His time in the sun would end, because it always did. And so, it wasn’t a matter of deserving anything— not Thor’s attention or time, not the promise of sex or affection— it was a matter of having something good, for what few moments it was within reach.

The plain front door waited for them at the end of the pathway. Bucky took the single step up onto his stoop and unlocked the door, letting it swing forward into the darkened home.

Bucky looked over his shoulder, and Thor’s face was intent on him. “Come inside?” he asked.

Thor’s voice was low, dark like the mead they’d been drinking. “Yes,” Thor said, and Bucky felt his belly clench up in want when Thor brushed past him into the dark entryway. His fingers felt shaky when he locked the door behind the two of them, closing them into the small room. Silently, they went through the awkward shuffle of yanking off their boots, laces only part untied and their boots tumbling over each other into ungainly heaps. Their elbows nudged in the small entryway, their bodies close but only barely touching. They were no longer insurmountably far away from each other.

There was suddenly no point to waiting. It was dark, they were alone. Honey wine and fruit were still fresh and tart on his lips, and he wanted— god, he wanted to feel wanted and warm, to feel safe. To put aside loneliness.

A huge hand caught Bucky’s hip even as he was turning into the brash, broad heat of Thor’s chest, and it was magnetic, moving forward even as Thor gently pulled. Their chests touched and Bucky’s breath stuttered a little even as his hands hesitated over the thick bulk of Thor’s pecs.

“Bucky,” Thor said, and the hoarse sound of it rasped pleasurably over Bucky’s whole body, but Thor didn’t say anything else, just dragged his big hand up Bucky’s back and into his hair, cradling the back of Bucky’s head. The touch was gentle, but it did not pull Bucky forward into a kiss— it only intensified the gaze between them, electric and hot, but still somehow fragile. A question, wordlessly offered.

And so the answer was Bucky’s to give.

Another split second, long enough to curl his fingers into Thor’s shirt—

Bucky had to stand on his toes to kiss Thor. Their lips bumped clumsily at first, rough and dry, a little uncertain. Thor’s fingers were digging into his hip, tugging on his braided hair, and then Thor’s hot tongue dragged over his lower lip. Bucky could only inhale, shocked, a lungful of cedar and citrus, fruit and wine— and then the kiss was suddenly right and easy. It overpowered him, and he was so thoroughly swept up into Thor’s arms, toes barely planted to the floor and his arms wrapping tight around Thor’s neck of their own accord. Thor kissed absolutely now, with certainty and confidence, and it allowed Bucky to sink into a pleasant receptiveness, to open himself to each ravenous demand. Bucky felt his whole body felt bow backwards, his spine somehow suddenly loose, like he was held upright by Thor’s strength alone.

“What do you want?” Thor asked, their lips all but touching still. They were both breathing hard, their bodies rising and falling in the scant space between them, and the sound of Thor’s voice alone was enough to make Bucky’s fingers curl harder into Thor’s shirt, to the broad shoulders underneath. “Ask of me and I’ll give it to you.”

Their faces were so close now, he could feel Thor’s warm breath on his cheek, could see the night-sky blue of those eyes. Thor’s beard scraped against his cheek, and Bucky had to keep his eyes from fluttering shut. “Come upstairs?” he asked.

On his face, Thor’s fingers were warm, touching the corner of his mouth in acquiescence. It was a grounding touch before they slowly untangled their bodies, drawing apart like an untied ribbon. The silence between them was fraught, tense with newness and the impending crash of desire. There was only the creak of the stairs to guide them as Bucky led Thor up to the attic bedroom, no lights turned up and their path just barely visible to their eyes.

Bucky turned on the dimmest lamp, just a little pocket of light that barely stretched across the room to his bed. Inside of Bucky, something ached when he saw the way that even in shadow, Thor seemed illuminated. Golden, like not even the full dark would’ve muted him.

It seemed almost wrong to touch him, but when Thor offered his hand, Bucky took it, and let himself be pulled back into Thor’s arms, leaning against the firm, unyielding wall of Thor’s chest. Immediately, Bucky felt burning hands dragging up the back of his shirt, the heat deliciously unbearable as Thor’s palms swept from his tailbone up past the middle of his spine.

At first, Bucky kept his hands over Thor’s shirt. Sex was touch and part of him was metal— sensitive, skin-warm, but still inorganic, slightly unbalanced. He didn’t know how to have sex when part of him was like this. But Thor took his own shirt off, breaking their kiss to lean back and yank it off and toss it carelessly away, returning to Bucky and crowding in even more closely, cupping Bucky’s face in his hands and kissing him to absolute breathlessness. It felt more natural than he expected to simply let both hands touch the deep groove of Thor’s spine, the sleek heft of a muscular back, rising and falling with each hungry breath. Thor didn’t react to the oddness of metal on skin, and Bucky… Bucky forgot to be scared.

“I’ve wanted this for longer than I should’ve,” Thor murmured into Bucky’s mouth. “God, you’re so sweet.”

Bucky laughed a little, the sound lost into their kiss. “I didn’t think…”

“Now you know,” Thor answered, and that was right, that was enough. What else was there to worry about?

It was surprisingly easy for Bucky to let Thor peel away his shirt. In the dim light, his left shoulder was just a lace web of pink and white silks, fainter than before; the seam between metal and flesh was softer now, no longer the same violent slash it had been for so long. Thor’s fingers were gentle and curious as they traced from scarred collarbone to metal bicep and Bucky shivered at the feeling, the oddity of a lover’s touch on that part of him.

 _There’s no rush,_ Bucky found himself marvelling. This was for the joy of sensation and fullness, the rapt wonder of exploration.

They were naked from the waist up, and their bodies slid together even more neatly than Bucky had expected them to. He seemed to fit so easily under Thor’s arms, his whole chest tucking so sweetly into Thor’s, like he could curl up small and safe and happy, and no part of him would show from beyond Thor’s bulk. The crisp little hairs on Thor’s chest and below his belly button tickled Bucky’s skin, rasping against his sensitive nipples, and Bucky shifted, deliberately letting that soft fur play over the tenderest hollows and grooves of his body.

Bucky smiled when he felt Thor press a sweet kiss below his eye, to the corner of his jaw, before slipping further down. There was nothing sweet, nothing gentle, about the way Thor’s mouth dragged down to lay waste to the thin skin of his neck, his throat, marking Bucky with teeth and the rough scrape of his beard, with long sucking drags that stung. It was natural to tip his head back further, to let Thor drag the hot flat of his tongue upwards from the fragile notch of his throat to the very tip of his chin. An animal savoring that shot right to Bucky’s belly, making him feel tight and hot. Desperate.

Clinging to Thor’s shoulders, he turned his face back to Thor’s and nudged their mouths back together again, hungry and wet but not too messy yet— deeper, now, bringing their bodies flush together so they could rut up against each other in patient, endless drags, each movement rolling into the next. Even through the thick fabric of their pants, Bucky could feel Thor’s cock, nudging right up against his own, all restless friction, testing the limits of their want.

Thor’s hands settled on Bucky’s ass, sliding down his back before kneading restlessly at the soft give, his thick fingers guiding Bucky into a more controlled grind. Bucky gave into the commanding sway of Thor’s hands and let his mouth drift downwards, the already-tender skin of his mouth abraded all over again by the coarse, short hair on Thor’s jaw. He loved the sting of it, and took his time running his tongue over the taut lines of Thor’s strong neck, tasting sweat and the rich, oily soap they used here. But it was more than that, too: there was sizzle of energy that lingered under Thor’s skin, there was the throb of blood and muscle, denser and more vital than anything mortal. It became almost addicting, to taste skin and power, to sink into that sweet, euphoric smallness of giving pleasure, knowing that it would be returned.

Foggy need crashed into Bucky, overwhelming but shapeless want, just imprecise desires that tangled, one into the other, in his mind. It was the first time in so bitterly long that anything he desired felt possible, and he was paralyzed by choice.

Thor’s fingers were pressing against the seam of his pants, trying to wedge between his cheeks but there wasn’t enough give to the fabric. They had to settle for a rough, dragged out friction that distracted them from the rhythm of their hips, the burning feel of Thor’s cock against his own.

“You have done this before,” Thor murmured, not a question.

Bucky nodded, breathing damp and warm into Thor’s bare neck. “Yeah. Long time ago, anyway,” he said, looking up at Thor’s face. The shadows slanted starkly over Thor’s face, over his nose and the curl of his handsome, hungry smile. He looked so much larger this way, out of the corner of Bucky’s eye, his capable hands still guiding them in a lazy, circular grind.

“Mmm,” Thor said, slowly dragging them backwards, towards the bed, giving Bucky’s mouth a brief nip of a kiss. “Good.”

They didn’t end up making it all the way over to the bed— the roof slanted too sharply for that, and so Thor stopped them in the middle of the room, under the peak of the roof. Bucky shivered when Thor popped the top button of Bucky’s fly in a single, smooth motion. “Let me see you,” he said. Bucky’s fingers shook a little, just a minute tremor, as he popped the rest of the buttons open, giving his dick a little more breathing room.

“You too, then,” Bucky said, nodding at Thor’s dick, the thick, hard shape of it where it pressed up against the line of Thor’s hip.

Thor’s fingers were quick, the fly parting to reveal dark curls and starkly carved hip bones. Bucky felt it like a punch to his gut when Thor took his own cock in hand, easing the fat shaft gently out, letting it stand up against his taut belly. In the dark, Bucky could just make out the foreskin, barely parted around the slit, and, still half-hidden by his pants, the heavy shape of Thor’s balls. They swayed a little as Thor jerked himself off, just a few easy strokes before he let go, stripping off his pants with all the nonchalance of a man with nothing to hide.

While Bucky peeled off his own pants, Thor sat back on Bucky’s bed, reclining against the pillows like they were his own.

“Getting comfortable?” Bucky asked, approaching.

For an answer, Bucky got back a lazy smile and Thor’s arm lifting up above his head to make space for Bucky. And maybe he should’ve been nervous, but it was easier than he thought to crawl in and nuzzle into Thor’s big body, letting their weight sink them right together into the middle of the bed. It was like being swallowed by warmth— the heat of Thor’s body against his front, a thick and hairy thigh against his cock. His hand braced on Thor’s belly. Thor’s arm around his shoulders, warm fingers already dancing across his shoulder blade, tracing over scars and skin aimlessly.

It was nice, Bucky realized, to lay here like this, desire lingering on the skin but not yet insistent. He could faintly hear Thor’s heartbeat against his ear.

“Come here,” Thor said, reaching over and tipping up Bucky’s chin just enough to kiss him. It wasn’t quite chaste— not with the way Bucky’s dick was riding up against Thor’s thigh, their naked bodies curving together— but it was still somehow sweet. A greeting of the places deep inside, the tenderest wants that lived between their bodies.

They kissed like that for a long time— longer than Bucky remembered anyone kissing him before, like kissing just for the sake of it. Thor cradled Bucky’s face, the back of his head, with a gentleness Bucky hadn’t thought to expect. In return, Bucky couldn’t help but let his fingers slip up and down over Thor’s stomach and chest, tracing the swell and grooves of muscle and scars. The rest of it was just the almost frictionless sweep of two bodies tucked in together, legs and bellies and cocks brushing together over and over again.

When the kissing stopped, Thor’s hand skimmed the crest of his cheekbone, and Bucky realized that he was shaking a little, a faint tremble that Thor must’ve felt, too. Everything was overwhelming— his body, pressed to Thor’s, felt new all over again, clean and bright, shivering at the odd fragility of desire.

Opening his eyes, Bucky saw Thor’s face so very close to his own— blue eyes gleaming prettier than the night sky, the slightly crooked charm of his nose. It made Bucky want to smile and laugh, and instead, he buried his face in Thor’s neck, inhaling deep and slow, letting himself sink into the easy pleasure of Thor’s hands stroking down his back over and over again. They were both still hard, hips brushing unconsciously as they inhaled in almost-tandem, the edges of their breath gone ragged.

Blunt fingers trailed over Bucky’s back, dipping into the divots at the base of his spine and tracing spirals ever-outward before slipping back to the familiar groove of Bucky’s spine. The fingers were warm but dry, and when they slipped down between his asscheeks, gently parting him, Bucky whimpered a little into Thor’s neck before he could stop it.

“Do you like this?” Thor asked, but it wasn’t coy— just curious. Did Bucky like this and want him to keep doing it, was all Thor seemed to be asking, like he could do something else, instead, and it would still be just as good.

Bucky’s fingers pressed harder into Thor’s chest. “Yes,” he answered, and twisted around, reaching for the little glass bottle he kept under the edge of the bed. He tossed it over his shoulder, already knowing Thor would catch it, and when by the time he laid back down, Thor was flicking open the cap and pouring thick oil onto his fingers, the both of them settling onto their sides.

Thor’s fingers were warm and thick, the slickness making it easy for them to glide down the top of Bucky’s ass to his hole, the oil smeared liberally the whole way down to the back of his balls. Bucky leaned into Thor’s chest and sighed, waiting patiently as Thor’s fingers went away and came back, slick all over again, rubbing firm little circles against his rim.

It was patient and good and Bucky aimlessly left kisses across Thor’s chest, leaning into the sweetness of it as Thor pressed in one finger and then another. Those fingers were thick and careful, but they weren’t delicate, and Bucky loved the steady, unhurried way Thor opened him up. It was a welcome change, to share the body’s longing ache with another person, and Bucky pressed his hands to Thor’s sides, feeling the faintly ragged breaths, heavy ribs rising and falling in short breaths. In the quiet, their own heartbeats were loud, and Bucky rubbed his face against Thor’s chest, savoring the warmth.

Thor’s mouth pressed warm to the shell of his ear. “What would you like?”

Bucky pressed a kiss to the hair on Thor’s chin. “Here,” he said, “let me roll over,” and Thor pulled his fingers away and let Bucky stretch across the middle of the bed, a pillow rolled up under his hips like a bolster.

Under his belly, the sheets were warm from their skin, and Bucky sighed, burying his face in the pillow next to Thor’s elbow. Bucky shifted, spreading his thighs and biting back a grunt when Thor’s weight moved and settled at the split seam of him, Thor’s big knees pressed to insides of Bucky’s thighs. He could hear the sound of Thor opening up the oil and stroking his cock, and the creak of the bed as Thor hunched forward again, now one fist planted in the pillows next to Bucky’s head.

The hot head of Thor’s cock slid up against the back of his balls, dragging upwards over sensitive skin until Bucky could feel it right up against him, the tip just barely catching on his loosened hole. Everything was hot and the oil was slick and Bucky’s back seemed to arch on its own, beckoning.

When Thor pushed into him, Bucky could feel the pressure of it all the way up his spine to his jaw. It was relentless and quick— not brutal but intense, their bodies slotting together in a single hot heartbeat. Bucky’s breath was hot, wet, and quick against his pillow and he reached out, gold fingers curling around Thor’s wrist, trying to anchor himself against the sudden glut of fullness.

There was half a sob caught in the back of Bucky’s throat, held there as long as Thor was buried inside of him, deep and unmoving. It was only when Thor started to pull out that the sound escaped out of Bucky’s mouth, the raw sound of it muffled into his pillows. It was unholy, almost, how Bucky felt in the aftermath of that sound, wrung out and empty, achingly aware of the place where the tip of Thor’s cock was pressed right inside of him, teasing at the gaping mouth of him.

Squeezing his hand tighter around Thor’s wrist, Bucky turned his head a little, looking up at Thor, draped in shadow and looking bigger than ever. “I can take it, you know,” Bucky said. “You don’t gotta worry about me.”

“Mmmm,” Thor said noncommittally, dragging oily fingertips up Bucky’s spine, right from the middle of his back to his neck. The pressure of it was perfect and Bucky arched right up like a cat, trying to chase the sensation. The motion made Thor’s cock slide in just a little more, the oil making him move hot and silky inside of him. The feeling made Bucky grunt, and Thor’s answering laugh was breathless.

Thor eased all the way back inside, pressing in so deep Bucky was ground right into the bed with the force of it, all the air forced out of him on a pleased whine.

“You _can_ take it,” Thor reasoned, and Bucky felt the tickle of Thor’s beard on his shoulder, a rough caress followed by a single brief kiss. “But I can be sweet to you, too.”

Those words were like a flick of a switch, something that made Bucky go soft and pliant as Thor started fucking into him in a way that was all tender intensity, relentless but gentle. It never hurt, it never made him ache, not even with the way his legs were pinned wide open and his arms were stretched right above his head. He was just pressed right down small, with Thor’s body holding him together against the soft, forgiving mattress. This wasn’t just the shallow rapture of getting fucked— something inside of Bucky was full up, swelling until he could feel the pressure of it in his toes and fingertips, his heart throbbing bigger and fatter, voracious.

Everything was so lit up it was almost hard for Bucky to focus on the hot squirm of pressure in his belly, on the hard line of his dick rutting right into the pillow under his hips. The heat of Thor and sex had him loose and fuzzy-headed, spun out in an endless, untethered loop of pleasure. They fell into an effortless rhythm, and Bucky realized that his golden hand had gone slack around Thor’s wrist, and they had somehow knotted their fingers together. On a hungry urge, Bucky dragged their hands under his body and tucked them under his body, pressing Thor’s palm to the place where he burning up with each jackrabbit heartbeat. It was terrifying, to feel Thor’s big, square hand right up against his chest— like Bucky was offering something.

“Gods,” Thor grunted into Bucky’s hair, and he could feel it, the hot gust of Thor’s ragged words and all the desperation that lived between their bodies. “You’re going to make me come.” And Thor’s hips were working faster, too, his thick cock pounding into Bucky with insistent, jagged pumps that made Bucky’s whole ass shake. Thor’s balls were just slapping right up against his taint, hot and full and it was just a matter of moments now—

When Thor came, it was a burst of throbbing heat, all that come splashed up so deep inside that Bucky felt full on it. He couldn’t help but grind back on Thor’s cock, milking out each last little spurt as he reached down with his other hand, grabbing ahold of his cock and jerking off while Thor was still hard enough to keep him split wide open. His grip was rough but his cock had been leaking so bad that it only felt good, all slick and fast. He didn’t want to wait anymore. He just wanted to feel good.

Bucky cried into his pillow when he felt the first slow waves of pleasure bowl him over, eyes screwed up tight against the hot bloom of unexpected tears on his sweaty cheeks. It hadn’t taken him all that long to get so worked up but it seemed to last forever, pulse after pulse of gluttony running at its own asynchronous beat. He felt cracked apart afterwards, and he shuddered when Thor pulled out of him.

They were both breathing too heavily, and Bucky sucked in huge, trembling breaths when Thor rolled them onto their sides. He was tugged right back against Thor’s chest even if they were maybe too hot and messy for it, but Bucky didn’t care, especially when Thor’s hand lingered over Bucky’s heart, rubbing at the soft patch of hair over his pec.

“It’s been… a long time,” Bucky said. “I forgot how good it could be.”

Thor’s answer was surprisingly quiet. “As did I.” Thor’s fingers stopped their lazy figure-eights over Bucky’s heart, and he intertwined his fingers with Bucky’s golden ones. “You are not breakable like the other Midgardians. I like that about you.”

Bucky squeezed Thor’s hand and Thor squeezed back. “Are we gonna fall asleep like this?” he asked.

Thor huffed into his ear. When he spoke, his voice was already lower. “Yes,” he said, his nose and beard and mouth bumping up against the back of Bucky’s neck. “But soon enough we’ll wake again.”


	4. Chapter Four

The sun battered down on Thor’s bare shoulders, brutal but good. His feet were bare on the hard-packed dirt of the training arena, and he dug in for a moment, grinning as he sized up his opponent. They were both breathing hard, sweating from the impasse they’d dug their heels into.

Sif looked back at him with her dark eyes gone gorgeous and bloodthirsty. Her broadsword was polished to such a high shine that it near blinded him with the gleam of light arcing down its blade like white fire. Her shirt was loose, drifting high above her taut belly. She looked every inch the goddess she was, and he liked her all the more for it. A good fight with one of his oldest and dearest friends lifted his spirits all the more, even if they were perilously close to a draw.

Thor wasn’t willing to smash her with the full force of Mjolnir, and Sif wasn’t willing to truly cut Thor with her dwarf-made greatsword.

“Drop the hammer, Thor,” she said, holding her stance, sword up and eyes locked on his.

Grinning, Thor tossed Mjolnir in the air and caught it handily. “Hmm. I don’t think I will.”

Sif’s eyes narrowed to dark little slits, and her chin jutted out a little— a look Thor was quite familiar with. “Putting on a show?” she asked, voice low but pointed, sharp, but not loud enough to carry. “For your new lover?” Her gaze cut hard to her left, exactly where Bucky stood, on the periphery of the crowd that always loitered around for training.

There was a split-second where Thor refused to be goaded, but of course he looked anyway. Just a brief moment, where he was distracted by the way Bucky looked in the sun, his arms balanced on the wooden fence, one tanned and one gold, both sides of him complemented by the dark blue of his shirt. Thor could just make out the soft, fat curve of Bucky’s lower lip and the cleft of his chin. The outline of Bucky’s body was heavy and strong against the bright sunlight: broad shoulders and thick legs, square feet planted solidly on the dirt. It made something in Thor’s chest feel hot and tight, shuddering with electricity.

Of course, in the next second, Sif was already pushing forward with her next parry. “You’re afraid to embarrass yourself in front of him. Wouldn’t want to lose to your second, would you?”

Thor gripped Mjolnir’s handle tighter for a moment, squeezing until he could hear the creak of leather. “Fine,” he agreed smoothly, lowering the hammer to his side. “Hand to hand. No swords, no knives, no _hammers_. Just strength.”

Sif’s stance relaxed a little, but Thor knew her well enough to trace the hum of errant energy that always seemed to coil in her strong arms, her tensed thighs. Always ready, that woman. “Aye.”

While she delivered her sword over to Skadi for safekeeping, Thor took the chance to meander over to Bucky. He realized, belatedly, that a leash was roped around Bucky’s left elbow, a ribbon of red that led to his feet, where Baloo sat at rapt attention. The puppy wiggled in his seat as Thor approached, and Bucky’s mouth held a little twitch of a smile, the corners of his lips just barely turned up towards the sun.

Thor was helpless against the urge, and he reached up to gently comb loose hair away from where it had fallen on Bucky’s brow. It was like silk, but thicker, a heavy glide against his roughened fingers as he tucked the loose lock into one of the braids above Bucky’s left ear.

“I’d ask you to watch the hammer,” Thor said, tossing Mjolnir up in the air. It returned instantly to his palm, the metal ringing as it cut through the air. “But…” He trailed off, placing the hammer between their feet with a muted thump.

When Thor straightened, he saw that Bucky was grinning at him. “I’ll keep an eye on it,” Bucky drawled.

There wasn’t time for it, but all the same, Thor put a hand on Bucky’s belly. He could feel the sharp, thick lines of his muscular torso, the inhuman weight that drew Thor in like some sort of gravity. Bucky’s mouth looked even sweeter this close up, pink and smiling like that. Carefree. Thor swayed closer, because he wanted to kiss Bucky, because he wanted to curl his hands into the thick hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck, because he wanted Bucky’s warm hands on his waist, holding their bodies together, chest to chest and thigh to thigh. Thor wanted to lose himself in something languorous, and there wasn’t the time for that.

After, there would be, Thor promised himself.

So Thor settled for gently squeezing Bucky’s hip, his mouth almost grazing Bucky’s temple before he turned away. “Wish me luck?” Thor shouted as he walked backwards into the earthen ring.

“Do you need it?” Bucky shouted back, and Baloo barked, adding to the buzz of voices that grew louder as Sif walked into the ring as well.

“Not really,” Thor said, laughing at Sif’s glare and dodging a sharp elbow to his ribs. There was time enough for one last moment of indulgence, the sight of a beautiful man waiting for him at the side of the arena.

Thor and Sif paced around the ring for a moment, their bare, dirty feet digging into the soil, breathing in the sweet Asgardian air in deep, slow breaths as they took the measure of each other.

Sif sent him one of her famously feral smiles, all white teeth and snarling lips. Thor felt his muscles coil up in response, his body channeling all the tight, whirling pressure of a storm before the rain came. There was nowhere for all of it to go, except for the fight.

There had been no time in Thor’s life that existed before fighting: play swords and wrestling with Loki at bathtime; the baby fat of him struck with blunted swords in the training yard and running for miles along the rivers that streaked towards Yggdrasil; landing hit after hit as he grew and felt the rightness of finally hefting Mjolnir in his hand. There were true battles, too, fought in the blistering cold of Jotunheim or the pearlescent sunlight of Vanaheim, the stench of death and misery always all but too potent to bear. And centuries later, he was still here, breathing in the clay and earth tang of the arena, body and mind all pumping in time to the beat of his heart, ready. Would he grow old, he’d still know the very feel of this, someplace in his tired bones, the sheer overwhelming physicality of crouching eye to eye with someone on this mottled red clay.

Sif’s mouth went from feral to an outright snarl, and Thor felt it in his whole body, could only imagine his own mouth was split into a bestial, cruel maw—

A horn sounded, a blare of angry sound, and that was it. All the fetters of respectability came loose and Thor tore forward, meeting Sif in an almighty crash. Their bodies tumbled, hard, a knee and a shoulder, an elbow, glancing off the hard-packed earth before they rolled, the both of them grappling for the upper hand.

There was a certain beauty to several hundred years of friendship, the ability to watch the lines of Sif’s body for the feint yet to come, to read the telegraph of motion in the faintest flicker of her body, the dart of her eyes. And yet there was still some surprise— a sharp elbow that got him straight in his belly, a knee jabbing his thigh. His body reacted without much thought: pinning an arm, his bare feet kicking out her ankles where she was trying to roll him.

Thor might’ve managed to fall atop her, but pinning Sif down was another matter entirely. Under him, she thrashed and fought, small but still strong, her muscles long and sleek as she wriggled out of his grasp again and again.

“No rules,” Sif panted, obsidian eyes dark and shiny with the selfsame bloodlust. Thor expected nothing less than total anarchy, but there was no time—

She bit him, _hard_ , right on the neck, and maybe there was blood but it didn’t matter, because Sif had wrenched her wrist free and was yanking him back by the roots of his hair and wriggling her thigh out from under him.

There was a flash of motion and then Sif had him laid out on his back, Thor’s neck tight from her iron grip on the hair at his crown. A sharp elbow dug into the meat of his arm, and her weight rested heavily on his waist, thighs tight around him and squeezing like the coils of a great snake. She smiled and he could see a little of his blood on the corner of her wide, wine-colored mouth.

There was a reason Sif was one of his oldest and dearest friends. It was with great pleasure that he punched her right in her ribs, where he knew she had a lovely, ragged crimson scar from a fight on Alfheim, only a few centuries old and cut so deep the skin around the scar tissue sagged and pinched.

“No rules,” he grunted back through bared teeth, flipping them again and slamming her into the clay so hard that plumes of red dust rose up to settle on their skin.

They wrestled like that for a long time, twisting back and forth like angry snakes in the sand. The cheers and jibes of the crowd made him feel light and quick and sharp, and they lunged, unrepentantly, for each other’s weak spots, laughing at each other even as it ached and burned. It was wonderful, and Thor almost regretted it when he managed to finally knock Sif onto her belly, pinning her arms behind her back even she bucked beneath his weight, trying to unseat him from the small of her back.

“Yield?” he asked, grinning down at her murderously dark face.

Sif just growled and gave one last earthquake of a shake— but Thor had been expecting it and merely rode the wave of motion.

He slammed her back down even harder. There was sweat stinging his eyes, but he could see the red smear of dirt, streaking up her long neck to the sharp blades of her cheeks, a pale temple and even into her hair. “Care to try that again?”

With a last baleful look, Sif blew out a lock of hair where it was sticking to her mouth. “Fine,” she grumbled. “I _yield_ ,” she bit out, loud enough for the crowd to hear her and raise up a raucous cry in response.

Thor released her and when he stood, helped her to her feet. He laughed when she tried to get in one last half-hearted punch to his stomach. “A worthy opponent,” he shouted, slinging an arm over her shoulder.

The sound of the crowd swelled up like a balloon, heaving with the throb of his heartbeat. Thor’s eyes moved on their own, seeking out the familiar sheen of that golden arm, and the heat in his body turned liquid when he saw that familiar little half-smile on Bucky’s face, the vee of skin at Bucky’s open collar.

Sif shoved Thor’s arm off her shoulder. “Go fuck your little human,” she said, not unkindly, pushing him to the edge of the crowd and already turning to her next opponent. “Fandral! Get out here you coward.”

Thor couldn’t even remember the how of it, but he found himself almost immediately in front of Bucky, their bodies mere inches apart. He was breathing too fast and hard to really get a deep lungful of Bucky’s scent, but he could imagine it, could think of nothing more than being able to bury his face in the curve of Bucky’s throat, the place where his hair gathered at the nape of his neck.

“Tell me,” Thor murmured, his hands circling Bucky’s waist of their own volition, fingers digging into the arch of Bucky’s back. “Have you seen the sauna at the palace?”

 

* * *

 

It was dark, but Thor needed little light to see the glittering black of Bucky’s eyes, the damp fall of hair sticking to his temple, his cheeks. Their mouths brushed again and again, tender and swollen from the ceaseless friction— and yet Thor could not stop himself from kissing Bucky hungrily, eyes avidly fixed on Bucky’s pleasure-slackened face.

It was almost too hot for this; they were drenched with sweat and the air was so thick that each deep inhale of the sauna air was like drowning. Bucky’s fingers kept slipping on his shoulders. Thor’s feet skidded on the damp stone floor even as he slid further down on the wooden bench.

And still, there was no way Thor could stop. Not when Bucky had eagerly crawled onto his lap as soon as they’d shut themselves into the sauna. Thor could live for thousands and thousands more years, and still he’d always remember the sound Bucky made, groaning low and soft as Thor stuffed him full, first with oil-drenched fingers and then with his cock, spit and oil slipping down his length in viscous trails.

Time eddied around them like water, and Thor, awestruck, ran wet fingers over the place where his cock had fucked Bucky open to a sweet pliancy, welcome and warm. Bucky’s hips faltered as Thor touched him there, and Thor had to kiss him for that all over again, his tongue slipping into Bucky’s mouth to taste him all over again. He felt drugged, felt like he’d been knocked on the head until his ears were ringing. Never before had Thor felt so weak during sex— not brought low by the act, but gently humbled, newly aware of his own smallness, the warp and weft of each and every realm that rippled outwards beyond his own. The weight of it made him bury his face in the hot curve of Bucky’s throat, eyes squeezed shut against the pleasure of that tight clutch spasming around his cock.

They were both sweaty and overwarm, and their legs stuck together where Bucky rocked on his lap, knees pressing in tight around Thor’s hips. Against his belly, Thor could feel the heavy, thick length of Bucky’s cock, rubbing all over his belly and making him stickier, wetter. Bucky was lighter than the average Asgardian, and it was easy for Thor to cup the fat curves of Bucky’s ass, coaxing him into deep, deliberate rolls of his hips. It was easy, that way, to nudge himself in deeper, to grind his hips just so and tip his head back to watch Bucky shake above him.

Bucky looked like a vision, draped in the dark privacy of the sauna, gleaming with sweat and flushed all the way up from his hard nipples to the long line of his throat, from the high crest of his cheeks to unexpectedly delicate temples.

“You’re close, aren’t you?” Thor asked, his voice rough, low, grating desperately out of his throat.

There weren’t words, but Thor could feel Bucky’s fingers tighten their desperate grip on his shoulders, same as he felt the heavy, blunt slap of Bucky’s cock against him as Bucky rocked harder, faster.

Thor smiled, dragging Bucky down again and again, ceaseless and ravenous in his want. “Aye, you are. Show me, give it to me,” he demanded. Thor could feel all the muscles in his legs tighten up, every muscle in his stomach tensing up. His hands dug new bruises on Bucky’s hips, and it felt good to hold and possess, to want something with such happy desperation.

When Bucky came, it was almost silent— just faint whispers of pleasure fell from that swollen red mouth, praise and breathy grunts. Thor’s cock was seized up in a vise grip, but it was barely another thrust and then Thor was coming too, pumping jagged waves of come into that sweet little hole until Thor could hear the sloppy wetness of the mess he’d made as his thrusts slowed down to nothing.

The come down was slow, mindless. Thor felt clumsy and drained, his mind wiped to white as the pair of them struggled to catch their breath in the thick, humid air. It was too hot to keep touching, and yet Thor couldn’t make himself let go of that lovely body. He didn’t want to drag Bucky off his cock, even as it softened and come dripped out of Bucky’s body on his lap. Even as it burned, there was something right, something good, about the way Bucky felt in his arms, on his body.

But they had to separate eventually; and they did silently, slowly, sticky limbs and tired joints moving with a reluctance that was thick in the air. It felt awkward, and wrong, to be suddenly a separate body again, no longer fused together by something sweeter. Thor sighed into the steam, and missed Bucky, jealous of each scant inch that formed between them.

Afterwards, they lay out on the benches. Thor lay his head down on a rolled up towel at one end of the bench, and Bucky did the same at the other. Their legs crossed at the knees, calves over thighs and toes nudging at soft flesh. It was a gorgeous, searing burn everywhere they touched.

“You could join us in training next time,” Thor said. In the come down, his breathing had slowed to a steady rise and fall, all deep lungfuls of hot air, rich with chypre perfume.

Bucky hummed noncommittally, his thigh jumping under Thor’s calf. “I don’t think so.”

“You’d do well, though,” Thor said. “Especially with that arm.”

The golden arm was brilliant and bright, even in the shadow, and it glinted as Bucky reached above his head, fiddling with the towel. “Yeah,” Bucky said quietly, dropping his arm back to his belly, golden fingers tapping restlessly at the divots of all those thick muscles. “I guess I… I can’t enjoy it like you guys do. You and Sif— you were laughing the whole time. It was easy for you guys. I don’t think it would be for me, Thor.”

Thor couldn’t think of anything to say, even though he wished, desperately, that he could piece together the right words, fit them together like neat little cogs and let them soften the sadness around Bucky’s heart. One hundred years of making war was nothing to Thor— and yet it was more than this Midgardian had even thought he’d live, and Bucky had spent most of it reduced to some sort of cursed automaton, that sweet humanity Thor so loved crushed down to nothing.

And yet, for all that, fighting was the only thing that made sense to Thor. Action, movement, the raw strain of true exertion— it was the only way he knew how to calm the frenetic static energy that seemed to skitter down his arms, up the back of his neck until even his hair ached. Fighting was a cure, not an ill, and Thor found himself wondering about the grey shadow of Bucky-before, the grim-faced man that Steve had chased from America to the bleakest corners of Europe. And then further back, the dark-haired Adonis Steve had spoken so longingly of, the kid with scraped knees and knuckles, the teenager in boxing gloves, the blue-jacketed man with eagle eyes and a bolt-action rifle. That man had died, and maybe, the fight inside of him had died as well.

It was Thor’s turn to sigh, scratching at his beard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I wish I could,” Bucky said. “I wish— I mean, it used to be like that for me, before the war. I used to fight every week at Goldie’s gym, you know? And I’d finish whatever fights Steve started, too,” he said. Bucky chuckled and even if the noise wasn’t exactly happy, there was a soft note of fondness in it, remembrance of something long gone and long treasured. “And even if I know my brain’s fixed, I still— I keep thinking that I just don’t want to hurt anyone anymore. Not if I don’t have to.”

It wasn’t Bucky’s usual way, to talk so freely about the things that had happened to him. Thor knew, of course, that Bucky took his long walks, talked to the dogs while he combed their fur, and filled at least three of the bent-cornered notebooks that were stacked on that small dresser in Bucky’s bedroom. But there was something different about putting it directly into words, even if they were looking at the elaborate patterned-wood ceiling instead of each other’s faces.

Bucky’s thigh, heavy, thick with muscle and plush fat, shifted against Thor’s knee, the friction of their damp skin like welcome flames. There was a part of Thor that wanted to grab ahold of Bucky’s leg and kneel between his spread knees, licking at salty skin, up from the soft skin at the insides of his knees, over the soft, short hairs that dotted the insides of his thighs, and then higher up still, to the welcoming crease of him, the come-slick sweetness of him.

Thor wanted to, but he did not. It was a lazy, indistinct want; laying here, tangled up and talking into the plumes of steam, felt like purification.

“I guess you’re a little like Steve,” Bucky said, his voice slower now, hazy like the thick air. “The two of you fight like you were made for it.”

“Aye, we fight alike.”

Bucky’s hand found the top of his foot, where the skin was thin, and rubbed small circles that seemed to melt all the way into the muscle and bone underneath.

“I think of Steve often, these days,” Thor said. “Sometimes in those council meetings I have to ask myself what Steve might do if he were here in my stead. And if that answer does not suffice, I ask, instead, what Loki might’ve done. But I am not like either man at all.”

There was a creak of wood and then Bucky’s legs were dragging along his, shifting as Bucky rose to sit upright. Thor opened his eyes and saw that the blunt weaponry of Bucky’s body was cast into uneven shadow, light spilling down his flesh arm while the forward curve of his shoulders cast his belly and groin into fuzzy, grey dimness. Bucky’s arms were crossed over the tops of his knees, loose and easy, so his big hands dangled at the wrists. Sweat and oil rendered Bucky’s calves to a glossy shine. Damp hair framed his pretty face, waves of shadow and light breaking over his blue-grey eyes, over the lean slope of his nose to the still-red curve of his full mouth.

Thor could feel an ache building inside of him, something inside of his heart that was either too large or too small, unable to keep time with the rest of that dense, tough muscle.

“I fear for the people of Asgard. My father's reign is coming to an end more quickly than they know. And I am his only son now, and yet I no longer feel ready the way I once did.”

Bucky did something Thor did not expect: Bucky caught Thor's hand and brought it to his lips sweet as anything, and kissed the thick skin of his smallest knuckle right above the nail. It was like the sort of kiss a man might give to a lady, and it was a strange sweetness no one had ever offered to Thor before. It made Thor feel a little giddy inside to be the unlikely recipient of such childish displays of courting.

“I think you’ll make a good king,” Bucky murmured, quiet but sure. “You’re a good man, Thor. You’re your own man.”

Thor smiled, or he tried to. “Thank you,” he murmured, sitting up enough to take one more soft kiss from Bucky’s mouth. “I’ve been having these dreams, of some darkness yet to come. It’s unsettled me.”

Bucky’s smile was only half-formed, a sad twisting of that pretty mouth. “Pal, I’ve felt that way since 1935.”

 

* * *

 

Steve looked tired, even with the fantastic sunshine of Wakanda shining over him. His face was haggard and his eyes looked tight around the corners, his mouth wound up tight into a too-firm little line. Thor had only landed in Wakanda a short while ago, and an unimpressed trio of Dora Milaje had led him here and departed without a word. When Steve opened his door, Thor could barely recognize him— unshaven jaw, his hair slicked back but longer, nearly touching the collar of his white t-shirt. This strange Steve took him into a blandly furnished living room and they sat in unexpected silence for a long moment before Thor spoke.

“How have you been?” Thor asked.

Picking his head up from the back of the couch, Steve gave him a wry smile in response. “That bad?” he asked.

Thor decided not to soften the blow. “That bad,” he confirmed, sitting down. “Though I think I feel much the same these days.”

The pair of them sat in silence for a little, both their heads leaned back against the couch as they studied the impeccable ceilings of Steve’s living room. Thor appreciated the stillness. Steve— like Bucky, in a way— was one of the few that he could count on for good quiet, the sort that made it easy to breathe and think without rushing to fill the void right away.

Steve sighed and Thor looked over. Maybe he recognized the tightness of Steve’s face from his own face in the mirror, these days.

“Do you ever know—” Thor said, and Steve turned his head without picking it up, the pair of them staring almost sideways at each other with their heads tipped back like that, “Do you ever know that something isn’t right? And the only proof you have is in your gut? A feeling? You know that danger is just there, and there’s nothing to be done. You’re blind, deaf, and still... Something’s coming.”

Steve was quiet but he was looking right at Thor, and he could see the way the other man was thinking, his blue eyes hard but distant. Steve always looked so focused, like he was always in the process of chipping away at his thoughts, breaking them into pieces that tried to make sense of this strange place they all found themselves in these days.

“We used to talk about that, back in the war,” Steve said. “Like a sixth sense. Bucky always had a real good gut, even when we were kids. Could see things coming a mile off.” There it was— the faint twinge of a half-gone smile, barely a flicker of anything. “Of course, there were a lot of guys that got real jumpy, seeing things that weren’t there. Exhaustion, they called it. I’ve been wondering lately if I know how to trust my own gut, these days. If I even should. If I’m making the whole thing worse by second guessing myself.” Steve smiled, and his eyes crinkled a little, and he looked suddenly younger. “I think we’re all a little exhausted.”

Thor grinned back, unable to stop it. “So what you’re saying, Captain, is that you have no answers for me.”

Steve laughed, and sat there quietly for another minute. “I trust you. You should trust yourself,” Steve answered with absolute sincerity.

“And you should not be so hard on yourself.”

“Maybe.”

The quiet crept back, and Thor took the time to study Steve, the trim but broad lines of him sprawled back across the couch. Even at rest, his body looked primed for a fight— a familiar consequence.

“I visited Dr. Selvig,” Thor finally said.

Steve looked at him askance. “They let you into the Avengers Facility?”

“Who’s going to stop me?” Thor said, cheerfully. “Besides, I landed on the roof, he likes it up there. They don’t insist on trousers if he’s on the roof.” He waved a hand at Steve’s baffled look. “He’s had a lot of difficulties, but he’s much better now. Brilliant man.”

“Of course,” Steve demurred, doubtless recalling the time Dr. Selvig spent under Loki’s mind control, like Clint.

“It was good to talk with him. He was among the first to recognize me when I first came to earth in this century, you know. He knew our stories, the legends that the Midgardians of the north made out of us. I had never before thought about how Midgardians might remember our kind. I thought so little of Midgard, and they had made us gods. I mean, they’re not _wrong_ , exactly,” Thor said, and Steve laughed. “But after New Mexico, I started to see Midgard differently. It became another home to me. And their stories became my own.”

Thor had barely had enough time to piece all of this together himself. He had come to Midgard to see Dr. Selvig and return him, but when he stood atop the roof of the Avengers facility, he realized that the other person he wanted to see… was Steve. He needed a little more time before he returned to Asgard, to the Warriors Three and his father. Before he saw Bucky again.

And so Thor crash landed in Wakanda, looking for the man he trusted best.

“We live such long lives on Asgard. And the more you learn, the more you forget, maybe. I don’t know, perhaps Loki would’ve remembered— he always knew too much, always reading.” Thor drummed his fingers on Mjolnir, thinking, feeling the quiet hum of the hammer under his fingers. “Something is coming. The Midgardian stories are grimmer, but they’re incomplete. Our stories are longer but they were written in the old tongue, predating my grandfather’s time. Riddles and prophecies. Centuries of reinterpretation have made them almost meaningless.”

Steve, decisive as ever, cut straight to the quick. “So what do you do?”

“I need to go to Muspelheim.”

Steve was quiet for a beat. “Which one’s that, again?”

“Fire,” Thor answered, succinctly.

Steve blinked, nodded, clearly trying to absorb the information, and for a heartbeat-quick moment, Thor wished that Steve, too, had come to Asgard. That he had seen the same things Bucky had, the little flourishes of Asgard that would be so out of place on Midgard.

Almost like Steve was reading his mind, the next thing out of his mouth was a question. “What about Bucky?”

That broke open a little dam inside of Thor, the quiet reservoir where he kept all his thoughts of Bucky. “He’s doing so well, Steve,” Thor said, almost shocked by the soft, earnest sound of his own voice as he stared up at Steve’s ceiling. “They repaired his memory. The Sons of Ivaldi made him a new arm. It’s gold.”

When Thor looked over at Steve, he saw that Steve’s eyes were squeezed shut, his fists curled up tight on his thighs. Thor remembered, like the burn of a knife to his guts, the unsteady way Steve had leaned into Thor’s body in Siberia, moments Thor had taken Bucky away. _Please watch out for him_ , Steve had whispered. _Please,_ he’d said again, and it was only now, in Steve’s temporary home in Wakanda, that Thor realized Steve had been not only asking, but begging.

“Bucky wanted to work, of all things,” Thor said, smiling when he heard Steve huff out a cracked laugh. “So he works in the kennels. He’s teaching the puppies commands now. They sit when he waves his hand at them. One of them follows him everywhere. Goes home with him every night now and sleeps in a box full of blankets next to his bed. He named it Hullabaloo.”

“Asgard has been good for him,” Steve said, his voice very even. His hands were flat now— rigid but no longer fists.

Thor agreed. “Yes.”

“And when you go to Muspelheim?”

That gave Thor pause— but Steve wasn’t wrong to ask. The thought was already lingering in the back of Thor’s mind. “Asgard may no longer be the right place for him, then.”

Steve sighed out, and to Thor’s ears, it sounded like relief. Steve opened his eyes up, finally, and looked at Thor. “Before you go, will you bring him something from me?”

“Of course.”

Thor stayed for a little while longer. They ate plates and plates of food, filling the coffee table until there was nowhere to put their feet as they ate. They talked more of normal things, of T’Challa and the sights of Wakanda— of Natasha and Sam— of what little Steve had heard of the others. It seemed like none of them were ever really here for long. They sneaked in and out of Wakanda, handling the outside world from the shadows. It was a suspension of the conversation they’d had earlier on this same couch, and though that talk of Bucky and Muspelheim lingered, it stayed far back, only clouding their periphery.

It wasn’t until Thor was ready to leave that Steve asked him to wait for a moment, vanishing down the hall and returning after a long moment. In between his hands was a thick envelope, and Steve turned it over and over in his hands before finally passing it over to Thor.

“I’ve had this for a while. I didn’t know— Well, I figured I’d see you sooner or later,” Steve said. _Buck_ was written across the envelope in pencil, cursive letters flowing from one to another. Thor took it and tucked it into his chest plate.

Thor didn’t say good-bye right away, or make any promises to deliver the letter. Instead, he studied Steve— the tense line of his shoulders, arms crossed tightly over his chest. His posture was as straight as ever, but there was something rigid about the way he held himself. Brittle.

“I have felt very lucky to know Bucky these past few months,” Thor said. “I can see now why he has always meant so much to you.”

Not much more was said between them. Steve escorted Thor down to the courtyard alongside his building and shook his hand. The tired creases around Steve’s eyes were fainter in the sun, and Thor belatedly spotted the faint tinge of pink sunburn across Steve’s nose, darkening the tips of his ears.

“Take care of yourself, friend,” Thor murmured.

“Could say the same to you,” Steve answered back, his crooked smile steadier now.

The last thing Thor saw before he raised his hammer, whisked away by lightning— well, the last thing Thor saw was Steve, arms crossed, standing alone in a Wakandan courtyard like he was the only person left alive on the fragile, stubborn earth of Midgard.

 

* * *

 

When Thor returned to Asgard it was evening, the pink and yellow sky married to purple along the glow of the city horizon. He climbed up the long trail to the old observatory tower and wasn’t surprised to see Bucky already there, sprawled out in the grass with Baloo curled into the crook of his golden elbow, little feet twitching in sleep. When Thor was close enough, he realized Bucky was wearing one of his shirts— it was a touch too loose, just a little too long. The folds of it were loose around Bucky’s pale throat, and it made Thor want to press his hand to the back of Bucky’s neck, to dig his fingers into all that hair and hold on for dear life.

“Hey,” Bucky said. His voice was quiet. “Didn’t expect you back so soon.”

Thor settled on Bucky’s other side, not wanting to wake the puppy up. Carefully, he leaned over and threaded his fingers through Bucky’s hair and kissed that pretty mouth as gently as he could, letting the press of their mouths linger until it felt almost like he’d had enough of it, of Bucky and everything that made him so sweet and good.

“I missed you,” Thor said simply, reluctantly dragging his hands away from Bucky’s smooth hair, the sleek plait of a tiny braid. He settled onto his back, tucking his hands behind his head for a pillow. “It was a difficult trip.”

Bucky reached over, and Thor smiled when he felt Bucky patting at his thigh, inching his fingers up until they were rubbing lopsided little circles into his hip. It was an almost graceless motion, awkwardly angled and the pressure inconsistent, and Thor never wanted Bucky to stop. “Was Dr. Selvig able to help?” Bucky asked, his fingers still lulling Thor.

“In a way,” Thor said, dragging a hand over his face with a sigh. “Let’s not. Not tonight.”

The fingers never stopped their little ellipses. “Of course.”

Above them, the stars were starting to burst to life against the darkening sky. “I also saw Steve,” he said. “In Wakanda, not New York.”

Bucky’s fingers did still at that, and Thor felt his mouth speak without his permission. “He misses you greatly.”

There was no answer at first, but Bucky eventually sighed, a quiet _yes_ murmured on that long exhale. At the sound, Thor reached into his armor to pull out the letter and passed it over. “This is for you.”

Bucky took the letter with the same fingers that had just been rubbing little circles into Thor’s hip, but he did not open it. Instead, he lay the letter down on his chest, right along his sternum. The flat of Bucky’s hand pressed down on that letter, like Bucky thought he could somehow put, into his skin, into his heart and lungs, the words Steve wrote, the ink he used and the paper he touched.

Thor felt like he knew, now. It had seemed likely, looking at that grim-faced Steve Rogers in Wakanda, but now, seeing Bucky in just the same way, the whole truth seemed spread out before him just the same as the city sprawled out at their feet. This was love, wasn’t it? And Thor didn’t know what to feel about it— happy, in a way, for such a thing to exist; sad, for the exiles they’d made of themselves. And sad for himself, perhaps, to be outside of such a thing.

“Will you read it?” Thor asked, looking at Bucky.

Bucky looked back at him. “Not tonight.” There was a little pause, a tremble in the air. “You look about as tired as I feel. What do you say we make an early night of it?” Bucky asked.

It was easy to agree to that. Bucky tucked the letter into his pocket and roused the puppy, and they all got to their feet slowly. Baloo stretched tiredly, and leaned into Bucky’s legs before jumping up on Thor, digging his paws into Thor’s knee, asking to be picked up.

“He might actually sleep the whole night if we make him walk down at least some of the way,” Bucky said.

Baloo trotted between their feet on the walk back into the city, though Thor carried him for the last of it, his little body just shy of too long to lie down the length of Thor’s arm. He snoozed and snuffled, his wet nose pressed against Thor’s hand.

Inside of Bucky’s little house, up in the bedroom, Thor settled the puppy into his little box, lined with thick blankets and a bedraggled rope toy, already worse for the wear, though Thor knew Bucky only made it a few days ago.

While Thor watched, Bucky placed the letter right on his short dresser, next to the collection of worn journals and the stubby pencils Bucky seemed to favor. It looked innocuous, just a little bit of white paper in the lamplight, a little creased and worn from its travels. It was here now, though, at its destination and yet unread.

They got ready for bed in near quiet, stripping down to almost nothing and crowding each other in that cramped bed, arms crossing waists and knees bent close together. When Thor inhaled, he could smell the sharp mint scent of Bucky’s hair, everything suffused with the warmth of being tucked in together like this.

In the morning— and Thor knew the sight well— the light would stream in through the windows, lazy but bright all the same. They would curl in more tightly together before slowly emerging from the bedsheets, not quite stumbling as they rolled out of bed.

In the morning, Thor would need to think about Muspelheim, about Asgard and his father and Heimdall and everything else that seemed to hang in the balance of some black unknown.

In the morning, the letter from Steve would be still be on Bucky's dresser, ink and paper and whatever came next.


	5. Chapter Five

On the third morning, Bucky read the letter.

It was dated for several weeks past, written in Steve’s neat cursive. The long, slim loops and curls were faintly old fashioned, and for a long time, Bucky just looked at the letters unseeingly. It had been a long, long time.

_Buck—_

_I think the last time I wrote you a letter I was still about a hundred pounds soaking wet and we lived down the block from each other. Writing this now, all I can think about is how much we’ve changed since those days. We really were just kids back then, weren’t we? God, I miss you._

_Maybe you remember but I never wrote you after you shipped out with the 107th, and it wasn’t because I didn’t have the time. They gave us time at boot camp to write letters, and after that, it’s not like the long hours on the tour bus didn’t give me plenty of time to put pen to paper. Turns out the longer I let it go, the harder it got. And then we were together again and it didn’t matter anymore._

_Here’s the truth. I never wrote you letters then because I was a dumb kid and a coward. So this letter’s been about a century in the making, if you count it that way. I can’t really guess how you’re doing, or what you’re thinking or feeling. The only thing I can do is hope that Asgard is treating you well, and that this letter makes a lick of sense to you._

_For me, it’s been maybe five or six years since I thought you died. But how much longer has it been for you? I’ve read your file cover to cover, memorized all the years they had to on ice and the years they let you out. And still, I can’t figure out the math. Does a year awake count the same when they didn’t let you remember who you are? A month? A couple days? I can’t make heads or tails of what they did to you._

_You were always the best man I’ve ever known, Buck. You’ve always been a good man, and this is the raw deal you got anyway. I keep trying to look it in the eyes, and back when I was looking for you, thinking about what they did to you would just make me angry. Now I’m mostly just heartsore and tired. I want you to be well, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it except let you go somewhere they can take better care of you than I ever did. I’m useless here, pal, and I know it._

_I used to think that fixing this would be as simple as getting us in the same place at the same time, but I can see now that there’s no chance in hell it could’ve been that simple. That was the wishful thinking of a man that just wanted his best friend back and didn’t look past the end of his nose. I made a hell of a mess and got a lot of good people in trouble, and I’d do it all over again. I mean that, Bucky._

_There’s been enough long nights and early mornings spent piecing this letter together in my head, and it’s still incomplete. I don’t think things have been the same between us since the war. I can see now that even back then, it was worse for you than it was for me. Things have been bad for you for a long, long time, and I never even wrote you a letter until now. I’m sorry, Bucky. I’m sorry for not writing to you, and I’m sorry for all the conversations we should’ve had a long, long time ago._

_I’ve got one more selfish thing to ask of you. When you’re ready, when it’s time— please come home, to Earth. I used to think I’d get the whole rest of my life thinking you were always just within reach. I can’t help but hope for that all over again, Buck._

_I hope you know how much I love you. Take care of yourself._

_Yours,_

_Steve_

 

* * *

 

It had stormed earlier in the day, a quick morning burst of rain and long, low rolls of thunder. Lightning had arced across the sky, slicing jaggedly against the miserable grey backdrop. It had cleared up before lunch, but the humidity had remained, pressing down on Asgard even as the clouds had thinned and lightened to a pearly blue-grey.

Bucky felt sticky with sweat by the time they made it up the long slope of the hill to the observatory, but the cooling evening air licked sweetly at his arms and face, the hair at the back of his neck. They had, on some silent agreement, taken the longer trail through the thickest part of the woods that ringed the observatory. And as the forest had thinned, the sky had gradually appeared over them, darkening as evening bloomed. Each moment up here felt more breathtaking than the last, the golden sprawl of Asgard like a glowing blanket beneath them, and Bucky inhaled deeply, breathing in the clean, fresh scent of the fragrant long grass and the deep waters that flowed around Asgard, leading from realm to realm.

Thor’s fingers skimmed down his sides, and Bucky leaned back into the kiss Thor brushed to his ear. “I’m going to miss this view,” Bucky said, unable to look away from it.

Those warm hands tightened, squeezing Bucky’s waist. “You can come back,” Thor said. “There will always be a place for you in Asgard.” It was a promise that made Bucky’s whole chest tighten up, his breath hitching on the inhale.

“Thank you,” Bucky said. “You didn’t have to let me come up here at all, but you did. So thanks, for all of it.”

Thor’s beard scratched the side of his neck, rough and tender all at once. “I’m glad I did,” Thor said lowly. “You have been a good companion. I hadn’t realized… I’ve been alone for longer than I’ve known.”

“Yeah,” Bucky replied. “Me, too.”

One last squeeze and a quiet sigh against the shell of his ear, and then Thor pulled away. “Enough of that,” Thor said, his voice back to its usual jovial cheer. “It’s your last night in Asgard. Let us enjoy it.”

Bucky let himself be pulled down into the long grass, smiling as Thor settled back the way he always did, with his fingers laced behind his head and tapping feet crossed at the ankles. Bucky just used his right arm, neck tilted a little awkwardly. With his golden arm, he picked through the grass, plucking up single blades one by one, and biting the sweet white stems.

Glancing over at Thor, he saw the slide of starlight over his profile, his face familiar and dear, utterly and always himself. And yet, for all that, there was something like Steve in him, the deep well of power that lived in their golden bodies, the nearly unshakable self. It made Bucky think of the horrible fear and exhilaration of being sixteen and wanting love in all the ways a man wasn’t supposed to, of being twenty-four and looking at Steve’s new body and his heart breaking with love all over again. It was looking at the night sky and Asgard and knowing that tomorrow meant goodbye.

“Tell me a story,” Bucky said, rolling a blade of grass between his fingers. “One you haven’t told me before.”

Thor hummed, thinking. Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky saw Thor’s boot twitch, jumping in concentration. “Alright,” he acquiesced. “Have I told you of the Norns?” His voice had gotten low, dark, like the swelling night sky.

“Only in passing,” Bucky said.

“There are three sisters,” Thor began. “Maidens that live in the roots of the world tree. They’ve been there for as long as anything else that’s lived in these realms. They cover the roots with mud, keeping the great tree alive. They have little company, but they are not lonely down there because they have each other.

“Down there, in the roots of Yggdrasil, there are three wells. The water flows through all the realms, like the water you see moving all through Asgard. Through your own Midgard. The sweet waters of Vanaheim, the icebergs of Jotunheim. All of these waters will find their way back to the roots of Yggdrasil.

“The well of Urd is where the three sisters make their home. Urd is the eldest of the three, born only a few scant moments before her sisters. She is the past, the keeper of everything that’s happened in all these realms.

“The next sister is Verdandi, the present, the fate that is befalling you. The middle girl, forever tucked between her two sisters. And the youngest is Skuld, who is the future. She keeps the fate that has been intended to you.

“Between the three of them, they make your fate.”

“Have you met them?” Bucky asked.

“Me? No. My father met them when he hung himself from Yggdrasil as a sacrifice, long before I was born. It’s how he has such magic. But truly, only the Allfather would dare climb the world tree.” Thor grinned, white teeth flashing. “There are some things more sacred than pride. Few things, of course, but I keep a little faith about me.”

There was a little pause, the little sigh that told Bucky that Thor had stopped to gather up his thoughts. “I’ve seen them, though,” Thor said. “In my dreams. They are always walking towards me, moving slowly through the storm and never quite reaching me before I wake. I stopped having the dream for many centuries, but it’s come back as of late. I wonder, all the time, what they might say when they reach me... I suppose I’ll know someday, when the time comes, but still, I wonder.”

By the time Thor had lapsed into silence, Bucky had almost forgotten that he was leaving in the morning. He turned on his right side, facing Thor and laying his metal hand on Thor’s chest. The gold was so sensitive that Bucky swore he could feel Thor’s heartbeat, steady and almost too slow.

“I should’ve been writing these stories down the whole time,” Bucky said.

Thor looked at him and smiled, leaning forward. “I’ll tell you as many as you wish, as many times as you want. You need only ask.” The last words were all but murmured into Bucky’s lips, a prelude of a kiss.

When Thor finally fit his mouth to Bucky’s, it was slow and deep. The ache of it made Bucky’s hand curl into a fist around Thor’s shirt, pulling their bodies closer together until it felt like he could be pressed right into the ground under Thor’s weight.

One of Thor’s hands was fisted in Bucky’s hair, pulling him away when it seemed like neither one of them had breathed in ages. They were gasping, breathless, when Thor spoke. “I had thought we could make it back to the palace but I don’t want to wait,” he said, his voice low and rumbling. His hips ground downwards, and suddenly Bucky was aware of how hard they both were, frotting together in some hungry, mindless instinct for pleasure. “Let me take you here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky agreed, kissing Thor again for all he was worth. Thor’s lower lip was fat and sweet when he pressed his teeth to it, not quite biting down but teasing. A wordless admission of his own hunger, the unrefined thinness of his own restraint.

There was one last bruising kiss— and then Bucky tipped his face downwards, barely managing to concentrate as he struggled with the buttons of Thor’s pants. He could feel Thor’s breath against his temple, against his hair, and then he was shoving Thor’s pants down just far enough to get at Thor’s dick, heavy and fat and sleek in Bucky’s desperate grip. He squeezed hard and thought better of it, letting go just long enough to spit into his palm.

They were too crushed together for Bucky to really get a good rhythm as he jerked Thor off, and it was harder still when Thor reached down to one-handedly tear at Bucky’s buttons, yanking his pants down until the waistband was tight around his straining thighs and his ass was pressed to the cool grass.

“Let me, let me…” Thor grit out, and he rolled Bucky like he weighed nothing, putting him on his side and crowding his big body up against Bucky’s back. There was the hot, silk slide of Thor’s cock against his ass. Bucky pressed back instinctively, the wet tip tagging his skin as their bodies slid together.

There was a short, uncoordinated pause, marked by the sound of Thor scrounging through his pockets while their bodies were tipped at uncoordinated angles. The thick, wet sound of oil felt even more frantic and loud than usual, and Bucky felt the jerk of Thor’s cock against his ass as Thor got himself all wet and ready.

The oil was warm when Thor pressed two fingers between his cheeks, rubbing firm, wet circles against Bucky’s sensitive hole. “Can you— like this?” Thor asked, sounding winded as he spoke into Bucky’s neck. Thor’s cock was right up against the crease of his thigh, nudging forward to where Thor’s fingers had split him open.

“Please,” Bucky managed to say. “Yeah, do it.”

Thor moved slowly, and Bucky groaned into the welcome flare of heat as the fat head of Thor’s cock slipped upwards, catching at his still-tight hole.

That first thrust was brutal, glacially slow even as it forced the air from Bucky’s lungs. It didn’t hurt, but it overwhelmed completely, leaving Bucky trembling, fingers digging into the grass even as he arched into what Thor gave him. To feel his body split open like that was just another way he’d been remade here, a discovery of pleasure given and taken so deeply that it echoed in his bones.

When he had taken every inch of Thor’s cock, Bucky swore, quietly, the sound gusting over the grass beneath his cheek. The noise Thor made in response was too low, too growling to be a laugh, and the very sound trembled inside of Bucky’s body like it had come from his own mouth.

They were pressed together for a moment of greedy hesitation, a closed circuit humming with energy just waiting to be spent. A heavy hand fit itself to the curve of Bucky’s throat, a calloused thumb sweeping a wide arc over Bucky’s pulse. Tipping his head back onto Thor’s shoulder, Bucky breathed into the pressure, the welcome smallness it invoked.

“Are you ready, little one?” Thor murmured, his voice like gravel.

Bucky licked his lips, his mouth gone dry. The shake of his body had become raw-nerved and indistinct, a shudder that had him clenching down on the thick cock pushed up inside of him. “Yes,” he murmured, the vibration of his words stuttering against Thor’s massive palm.

When Thor began to move inside of him, it was like the rise and fall of waves as they lapped at the wet shore on a windless day. The tide of their bodies was unyielding but gentle, and Bucky wondered if it were possible to be overwhelmed at how very gently he was held, at the tender ache of fullness that followed each hungry pulse of near-emptiness. With their bodies curled together, arms holding tight and knees tucked right up, there was little leverage, but that didn’t matter. Not when Thor’s cock was pushing into him as deep as it could go, and not when each thrust was a new wave of indulgent, lingering fullness.

Something inside Bucky’s chest felt like it was swelling up. It was something too big to be kept inside of his body, but too fragile to let go of just yet, and he knew without asking that Thor felt it too. He knew from the way Thor’s mouth pressed fervent kisses to the back of his neck, from the crushing way Thor pulled him close as their bodies moved together.

It never seemed to really get any faster or harder, and yet Bucky could feel his body coiling up tight, his dick hard and leaking all over his lazily moving hand. He could feel that Thor was starting to grind up into him with less and less finesse, the sleek motion of their bodies giving way to something ever more ravenous.

Thor came first, pulling out to jerk off onto the grass between them, and Bucky tipped right after, dragging the pleasure right out until he felt like he’d been wrung out, to nothing but halting breath and the well-worn pliancy of a sated body.

They lay there in the grass for a long time, only somewhat mindful of the slick messes they’d made of the grass, and unwilling to detangle their bodies just yet.

 

* * *

 

At the end of the evening, they sat side by side, just beyond the cavernous black shadow cast by the crumbling observatory tower. In front of them, Asgard was a beacon, the immense eye of a lighthouse too vast to imagine. Even the night was too weak to dampen her glow.

A gentle hand swept over the braids above Bucky’s ear, drawing him out of his reverie. “You look peaceful,” Thor said.

Bucky sighed out, leaning into Thor’s touch before it withdrew, closing over his own on the grass. “Yeah, I think I am,” he said.

“Do you want to go back down?”

Bucky looked at Thor, studying the laugh lines that framed his pretty cerulean eyes, the shape of his mouth and the strong line of his jaw. Bucky never wanted to forget Thor, and he hoped he never would. Like this, their faces were so close they were almost touching. Bucky tipped his face forward just a little. “Not just yet,” he said.

“As you wish,” Thor agreed, and then there was nothing between them but a kiss.


	6. Epilogue

The same day that Bucky Barnes appeared in Wakanda with a little brown dog, something strange happened in Tønsberg.

It was a small town in southern Norway, salt-scented and dotted with brightly colored buildings that weathered quickly along the coastline. The town faced the sea, the boardwalks and the marinas pulling passersby inexorably towards the water. At the town’s back were the mountains, looming like a broad, protective arm cast over thin shoulders.

On that day, an unremarkable day in late summer, something came down from the mountains.

No one noticed at first. Plenty of wildlife flourished in Tønsberg, fed richly by the many nature preserves in the surrounding area. It was not unusual to catch sight of something moving in the distance, grazing at the grass that crawled, determinedly, up the side of the mountain.

But this creature came closer, and people began to see it and wonder. 

It was big, a pale white shape that seemed to glide effortlessly over the verdant greenery. The closer it came to town, the more the details seemed to splinter into fanciful oddity.

A child said they saw a great white stag. An older woman adjusted her glasses and wondered at the sight of a great cormorant in the far distance, somehow bleached to bone. A farmer received a phone call— _Have you lost a horse?_ — but she had not. Two game hunters, too drunk to leave the pub, wondered if they might spend the next day up in the mountains, searching for tracks.

When the creature finally came into town, it was leaning into evening, the slow-setting sun a backdrop to the slow churn of the town’s nightlife. The marina twinkling with fairy lights; the shopfronts, the restaurants and the bars were all lit up from within. Streetlights glowed, the sodium lighting ethereal when paired with the reflective gleam of the sea. 

The creature walked through the town as though it had always been here, or at the very least, been here before.

The creature, the townspeople finally saw, was a winged horse, white as a pearl. The silvery streaks of ancient scars dotted her lovely coat, and the wind made a sweet whistle as it brushed the long feathers of her wings. Her tail and mane were long, but well maintained; her coat brushed to a high gloss. 

In an age where Thor had returned to Earth, where Loki had tried his hand at taking over the Earth, it didn’t seem impossible that a Valkyrie's horse had found its way to Tønsberg, of all places. It seemed, in a way, to be almost fate. A newly gilded age of Norse mythology brought to life.

But some people remembered the same bitter, inevitable conclusion to all the old stories. Ragnarok— not just the death of the gods, but the slaughter of humanity, as well, the nine realms wiped clean until only the faintest traces of life remained.

So the people of Tønsberg, in the way of old, looked at this beautiful winged horse and wondered when death might come for them, too.

**Author's Note:**

> That's it, folks! Let us know what you think!
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